User Guide/OpenVZ Philosophy

Warning: This User's Guide is still in development

User's Guide Preface OpenVZ Philosophy Installation and Preliminary Operations Operations on Containers Managing Resources Advanced Tasks Troubleshooting Reference

About OpenVZ Software

What is OpenVZ

OpenVZ is a complete server automation and virtualization solution developed by SWsoft. OpenVZ creates multiple isolated containers (CTs) on a single physical server to share hardware and management effort with maximum efficiency. Each CT performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server for its users and applications as it can be rebooted independently and has its own root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries, and configuration files. Light overhead and efficient design of OpenVZ makes it the right virtualization choice for production servers with live applications and real-life data.

The basic OpenVZ container capabilities are:

• Dynamic Real-time Partitioning — Partition a physical server into tens of CTs, each with full dedicated server functionality.
• Resource Management — Assign and control CT resource parameters and re-allocate resources in real-time.
• Mass Management — Manage a multitude of physical servers and containers in a unified way.

OpenVZ Applications

OpenVZ provides a comprehensive solution for Hosting Service Providers allowing them to:

• Have hundreds of customers with their individual full-featured virtual private servers (Virtual Private Servers) sharing a single physical server;
• Provide each customer with a guaranteed Quality of Service;
• Transparently move customers and their environments between servers, without any manual reconfiguration.

If you administer a number of Linux dedicated servers within an enterprise, each of which runs a specific service, you can use OpenVZ to consolidate all these servers onto a single computer without losing a bit of valuable information and without compromising performance. Virtual Private Servers behave just like an isolated stand-alone server:

• Each container has its own processes, users, files and provides full root shell access;
• Each container has its own IP addresses, port numbers, filtering and routing rules;
• Each container can have its own configuration for the system and application software, as well as its own versions of system libraries. It is possible to install or customize software packages inside a container independently from other CTs or the host system. Multiple distributions of a package can be run on one and the same Linux box.

In fact, hundreds of servers may be grouped together in this way. Besides the evident advantages of such consolidation (increased facility of administration and the like), there are some you might not even have thought of, say, cutting down electricity bills by times!

OpenVZ proves invaluable for IT educational institutions that can now provide every student with a personal Linux server, which can be monitored and managed remotely. Software development companies may use virtual environments for testing purposes and the like.

Thus, OpenVZ can be efficiently applied in a wide range of areas: web hosting, enterprise server consolidation, software development and testing, user training, and so on.