Download/live CD

Here you can find OpenVZ Live CD images. Live CD is a great way to test drive the OpenVZ technology without a need to actually install it on your machine.

We offer two live CDs at the moment. The first one is based on Knoppix 5.1.1 and the second one is based on Centos 4.4.

Download

The precreated ISO images are available directly from download.openvz.org/livecd/ or any of the download mirrors.

CentOS

File	Size
CentOS-4.4-OpenVZ-i386-LiveCD.iso	684 MB
CentOS-4.4-OpenVZ-i386-LiveCD.iso.md5	68 B
CentOS-4.4-OpenVZ-i386-LiveCD.iso.asc

Knoppix

File	Size
KNOPPIX_V5.1.1-OPENVZ-CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso	683 MB
KNOPPIX_V5.1.1-OPENVZ-CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso.md5	77 B
KNOPPIX_V5.1.1-OPENVZ-CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso.asc	189 B

Note that .md5 and .asc files does not need to be copied to the CD-R; they are here to check the authenticity of the iso file. This page has some info on this topic.

Burning

After downloading the image, you have to burn it to the actual media, i.e. a CD-R or CD-RW disk. The process depends on the actual OS and CD burning software that you have, and the exact details are out of scope of this article.

If you don't know how to burn the ISO image to CD-R, try this document.

Booting

Just insert the fresh CD into your CD-ROM and reboot. In some cases you have to modify your BIOS settings in order to enable booting from a CD. If you use CentOS-based CD you'll be able to choose the kernel to boot: ovz9rh, ovz18, ovz18rh, ovz20 or linux (original CentOS kernel).

Using

Upon the successful boot, a browser window with some helful hints will appear to help you start using OpenVZ. The latest version of that document is also available on this wiki: Getting started with OpenVZ live CD.

Limitations

Since this is a live CD, everything is created in RAM, i.e. is not persistent. If you will create a number of VEs, they will not be available after the reboot.

A number of VEs that you can create using this live CD greatly depends on the amount of RAM your machine has, since the system uses RAM instead of a hard disk. On a 1 gigabyte RAM machine you can create about 5 VEs. To work around this, you have to have a disk partition mounted to /vz/private/ for CentOS-based CD and to /var/lib/vz/private for KNOPPIX-based CD.

OpenVZ disk quota does not work on LiveCD at the moment due to OpenVZ Bug #558, so df in VE shows ludicrous values if quota is on. Because of it on CentOS 4.4 LiveCD disk quota is switched off by default.

Checkpointing (and consequently live migration) doesn't work on KNOPPIX LiveCD at the moment due to OpenVZ Bug #606. You can work around it by mounting some filesystem (ext2, ext3, tmpfs) to /var/lib/vz/private directory. On CentOS-based LiveCD tmpfs is mounted on this directory automatically during the booting.

CD contents

CentOS CD contents

This CD is based on CentOS 4.4 Live CD and contains the following OpenVZ packages:

• kernels:
  • original CentOS 4.4 kernel without virtualization (2.6.9-42.livecd.c4)
  • 2.6.9-023stab044.4
  • 2.6.18-028stab035
  • 2.6.18-028stab035-rhel5
  • 2.6.20-ovz007.1
• tools:
  • vzctl 3.0.18
  • vzquota 3.0.9
• template tools:
  • vzyum-2.4.0-11
  • vzrpm44-4.4.1-22.5
  • vzrpm43-4.3.3-7
  • vzpkg-2.7.0-18
• template metadatas:
  • vztmpl-centos-4-2.0-2
  • vztmpl-fedora-core-3-2.0-2
  • vztmpl-fedora-core-4-2.0-2
  • vztmpl-fedora-core-5-2.0-2
• precreated templates:
  • centos-4-i386-minimal
  • fedora-core-5-i386-minimal
  • debian-3.1-i386-minimal

The number of original CentOS packages were removed (openoffice, gimp, etc.) in order to free disk space for OpenVZ packages and templates.

Knoppix CD contents

This CD contains the following OpenVZ packages:

• kernel 2.6.18-028stab027
• vzctl 3.0.16
• vzquota 3.0.9

plus the number of precreated templates:

• Debian 3.1 minimal
• CentOS 4 minimal
• Fedora Core 5 minimal

It also contains all the software from the original Knoppix 5.1.1 CD, excluding:

• OpenOffice
• GIMP
• Frozen Bubble

The above packages were taken out to make some room for OpenVZ packages.

Changelog

• 7 May 2007, initial version based on Knoppix 5.1.1
• 5 July 2007, version based on Centos 4.4

External links

• knoppix.com, the home of Knoppix distribution
• centos.org, the home of CentOS distribution