Installation and Preliminary Operations
21
Hardware Compatibility
The Hardware Node requirements for the standard 32-bit edition of OpenVZ are the following:
IBM PC-compatible computer;
Intel Celeron, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4, Xeon, or AMD Athlon CPU;
At least 128 MB of RAM;
Hard drive(s) with at least 4 GB of free disk space;
Network card (either Intel EtherExpress100 (i82557-, i82558- or i82559-based) or 3Com
(3c905 or 3c905B or 3c595) or RTL8139-based are recommended).
The computer should satisfy the Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Core hardware
requirements (please, see the hardware compatibility lists at
www.redhat.com
).
The exact computer configuration depends on how many Virtual Private Servers you are going
to run on the computer and what load these VPSs are going to produce. Thus, in order to choose
the right configuration, please follow the recommendations below:
CPUs. The more Virtual Private Servers you plan to run simultaneously, the more CPUs
you need.
Memory. The more memory you have, the more Virtual Private Servers you can run. The
exact figure depends on the number and nature of applications you are planning to run in
your Virtual Private Servers. However, on the average, at least 1 GB of RAM is
recommended for every 20-30 Virtual Private Servers;
Disk space. Each Virtual Private Server occupies 400–600 MB of hard disk space for
system files in addition to the user data inside the Virtual Private Server (for example, web
site content). You should consider it when planning disk partitioning and the number of
Virtual Private Servers to run.
A typical 2–way Dell PowerEdge 1650 1u–mountable server with 1 GB of RAM and 36 GB of
hard drives is suitable for hosting 30 Virtual Private Servers.
Software Compatibility
The Hardware Node should run either Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 or 4, or Fedora Core 3 or 4,
or CentOS 3.4 or 4. The detailed instructions on installing these operating systems for the best
performance of OpenVZ are provided in the next sections.
This requirement does not restrict the ability of OpenVZ to provide other Linux versions as an
operating system for Virtual Private Servers. The Linux distribution installed in a Virtual
Private Server may differ from that of the host OS.
