Installation on Debian/old

OpenVZ is now a part of Debian Sid (a.k.a. "unstable") repository. This article describes how to install OpenVZ on a Debian Sid system.

Installing the utilities and kernel patch

To install the OpenVZ kernel patch and utilities, run the following:

apt-get update
apt-get install kernel-patch-openvz vzctl vzquota

Creating the kernel package

To create a kernel package, you need to download and unpack 2.6.16 “vanilla” kernel first:

cd /usr/src/
wget http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.16.tar.bz2
tar cjf linux-2.6.16.tar.bz2
cd linux-2.6.16

(Note that you do need a vanilla kernel for this, because the OpenVZ kernel patch doesn't apply cleanly to the Debian linux-source-2.6.16 package; see Debian bug #377707.)

Next, get the proper kernel config from download.openvz.org. Below is the example of using smp config for i686:

wget http://download.openvz.org/kernel/devel/026test015.1/configs/kernel-2.6.16-026test015-i686-smp.config.ovz
mv kernel-2.6.16-026test015-i686-smp.config.ovz .config

{{Note|example shows getting the config for 026test015 kernel. If you have a different kernel (kernel-patch-openvz), choose the corresponding config.}

Now you can apply openvz kernel patch and compile the kernel:

make-kpkg --added_patches openvz