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OpenVZ with Amazon Cloud

Written by Chaitanya Ranade | Aug 28, 2013 11:34:45 AM

In my previous Blog I referred about using popular control panel i.e. cPanel on Amazon Server. In this blog I am going to talk about Virtualization with Amazon Cloud and Control panel which is widely used for this purpose. In hosting industry for container-based virtualization people are mostly using OpenVZ for Linux and Virtuzzo for Linux/Windows.

What is OpenVZ?

OpenVZ is a container-based virtualization for Linux. OpenVZ creates multiple secure, isolated Linux containers (otherwise known as VEs or VPSs) on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each container performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; a container can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files. For more information please refer OpenVZ Wiki.

OpenVZ with Amazon Cloud

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Amazon now support OpenVZ kernel and that means we can configure OpenVZ on top of Amazon EC2. Amazon announced ability to load and manage your own custom kernels when you launch an instance.

This feature allows us to launch a special Amazon Kernel Image (AKI), based on Xen PV-GRUB, which loads your kernel of choice from your AMI when you launch an instance and OpenVZ works on XEN so that means now we can configure it on Amazon EC2.

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There are few simple steps to do it.

Launch an Linux Instance from AWS Console

  1. Access SSH via Putty
  2. Override some kernel parameters
  3. Install OpenVZ and dependencies
  4. Install OpenVZ Kernel to boot by default
  5. Install OpenVZ template and start creating your First container inside Amazon EC2