Quick installation (legacy)
This document briefly describes the steps needed to install OpenVZ on your RHEL 6 (CentOS 6, Scientific Linux 6) machine. For Debian based systems, please see Installation on Debian.
Contents
Requirements
This guide assumes you are running RHEL (CentOS, Scientific Linux) 6 on your system. Currently, this is a recommended platform to run OpenVZ on.
/vz file system
It is recommended to use a separate partition for containers (by default /vz) and format it to ext4.
yum pre-setup
Download openvz.repo file and put it to your /etc/yum.repos.d/
repository:
wget -P /etc/yum.repos.d/ http://ftp.openvz.org/openvz.repo
Import OpenVZ GPG key used for signing RPM packages:
rpm --import http://ftp.openvz.org/RPM-GPG-Key-OpenVZ
Kernel installation
# yum install vzkernel
System configuration
Note: With vzctl 4.4 or newer there is no need to do manual configuration. Skip to #Tools_installation. |
Please make sure the following steps are performed before rebooting into OpenVZ kernel.
sysctl
There are a number of kernel parameters that should be set for OpenVZ to work correctly. These parameters are stored in /etc/sysctl.conf file. Here are the relevant portions of the file; please edit accordingly.
# On Hardware Node we generally need # packet forwarding enabled and proxy arp disabled net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1 net.ipv6.conf.default.forwarding = 1 net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding = 1 net.ipv4.conf.default.proxy_arp = 0 # Enables source route verification net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter = 1 # Enables the magic-sysrq key kernel.sysrq = 1 # We do not want all our interfaces to send redirects net.ipv4.conf.default.send_redirects = 1 net.ipv4.conf.all.send_redirects = 0
SELinux
SELinux should be disabled. Put SELINUX=disabled
to /etc/sysconfig/selinux
:
echo "SELINUX=disabled" > /etc/sysconfig/selinux
Tools installation
OpenVZ needs some user-level tools installed:
# yum install vzctl vzquota ploop
Reboot into OpenVZ
Now reboot the machine and choose "OpenVZ" on the boot loader menu (it should be default choice).
Download OS templates
An OS template is a Linux distribution installed into a container and then packed into a gzipped tarball. Using such a cache, a new container can be created in a minute.
Download precreated template caches from Downloads » Templates » Precreated, or directly from download.openvz.org/template/precreated, or from one of the mirrors. Put those tarballs as-is (no unpacking needed) to the /vz/template/cache/ directory.
Next steps
OpenVZ is now set up on your machine. Follow on to basic operations in OpenVZ environment document.