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OpenVZ Philosophy
16
OpenVZ is installed in such a way that you will be able to boot your computer either with
OpenVZ support or without it. This support is presented as “OpenVZ” in your boot loader and
shown as
OpenVZ Layer
in the figure above.
However, at this point you are not yet able to create Virtual Private Servers. A
Virtual Private
Server
is functionally identical to an isolated standalone server, having its own IP addresses,
processes, files, users, its own configuration files, its own applications, system libraries, and so
on. Virtual private servers share the same
Hardware Node
and the same OS kernel. However,
they are isolated from each other. A Virtual Private Server is a kind of ‘sandbox’ for processes
and users.
Different Virtual Private Servers can run different versions of Linux (for example, SuSE 9.2 or
Fedora Core 4 and many others). Each VPS can run its own version of Linux. In this case we
say that a VPS is based on a certain OS template. OS templates are packages shipped with
OpenVZ. Before you are able to create a Virtual Private Server, you should install the
corresponding OS template in OpenVZ. This is displayed as
OpenVZ Templates
in the scheme
above.
After you have installed at least one OS template, you can create any number of VPSs with the
help of standard OpenVZ utilities, configure their network and/or other settings, and work with
these VPSs as with fully functional Linux servers.