Installing OpenVZ on Amazon EC2

December 1st, 2011 by bananos

#!/bin/bash #detect newly installed OpenVZ kernel VMLINUZ_XEN=`ls /boot/ | grep -i "^vmlinuz" | grep -i "stab"` INITRD_XEN=`ls /boot/ | grep -i "^initrd" | grep -i "stab"` if [ $VMLINUZ_XEN ]; then echo " title CentOS-openvz-xen root (hd0) kernel /boot/$VMLINUZ_XEN root=/dev/sda1 initrd /boot/$INITRD_XEN" >> /boot/grub/menu.lst #Make sure we'll boot into newly installed XEN kernel, which have INDEX=1 sed -i 's/default=0/default=1/' /boot/grub/menu.lst fi

Check your /boot/grub/menu.lst, it should look like following:

default=1 title centos5.6 root (hd0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-238.5.1.el5xen root=/dev/sda1 initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-238.5.1.el5xen.img title CentOS-openvz-xen root (hd0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-274.3.1.el5.028stab094.3xen root=/dev/sda1 initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-274.3.1.el5.028stab094.3xen.img

Reboot and then login again to check that you’re on OpenVZ kernel:

ssh -i ~/aws_ssh.key root@ec2-204-236-152-176.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com Last login: Tue Nov 29 05:34:50 2011 from 94.45.135.130 [root@ip-10-176-46-67 ~]# uname -a Linux ip-10-176-46-67 2.6.18-274.7.1.el5.028stab095.1xen #1 SMP Mon Oct 24 21:00:35 MSD 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Download & install OpenVZ CentOS5 template:

wget http://download.openvz.org/template/precreated/centos-5-x86_64.tar.gz #Symlink OpenVZ CentOS template [ -d /vz/template/cache ] || mkdir -p /vz/template/cache ln -s /root/centos-5-x86_64.tar.gz /vz/template/cache

Create your first OpenVZ container(VM)

vzctl create 101 --ostemplate centos-5-x86_64 > /dev/null vzctl set 101 --ipadd 10.0.102.101 --save > /dev/null vzctl set 101 --nameserver 8.8.8.8 --save > /dev/null vzctl set 101 --name "APP1" --save > /dev/null vzctl set 101 --onboot yes --save > /dev/null

Try to login into APP1 shell:

vzctl enter 101

At this point, if you was able to create APP1 container, you can setup other components of your system — Database, Cache server, whatever you want.

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Posted in sysadmin | 5 comments

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  • Raj

    Curios , how many ip addresses do we get from AWS ?

    • Anonymous

      Did you mean external(world visible) IP addresses? 

  • Sam

    Excellent work, thanks for this write-up. I was able to copy-paste the instructions exactly and get this working. 

    Note that you will have to “vzctl start 101″ before “vzctl enter 101″.

    Also, this works only with CentOS 5.6 with PV Grub – I couldn’t get it running on a CentOS 6 image.

    • Anonymous

      Thanks for update! Actually, we’ve moved to CentOS 6.0 because of zero swap in older OpenVZ kernels. Pretty heavy stuff like MongoDB/elasticsearch just failed to run on 5.6 no matter how hard we played with container configuration. New RHEL6 based OpenVZ kernel has new memory model, and our infrastructure works like a charm. 

      http://wiki.openvz.org/VSwap

      Configuration on CentOS6 is even simpler, because you don’t have to install special kernel with XEN enabled, as of RHEL6 it’s enabled by default, it looks something like this

      wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/openvz.repo http://download.openvz.org/openvz.reporpm
      rpm –import http://download.openvz.org/RPM-GPG-Key-OpenVZ 
      yum –enablerepo=openvz-kernel-rhel6 -y install vzkernel.x86_64 vzkernel-devel.x86_64 vzctl.x86_64 vzquota.x86_64

      Another tip is that you should make sure that installer will add a valid record into /boot/grub/menu.lst  because it fails to do so sometimes

  • si

    Hi, Would you tell us approximately how much you are paying to run this configuration on EC2? I’ve thought of running something similar, yet when I look into the EC2 pricing the costs run up too high. Especially if I include use of bandwidth.