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OpenVZ Philosophy
18
Understanding Licenses
The OpenVZ software consists of the OpenVZ kernel and user-level tools, which are licensed
by means of two different open source licenses.
The OpenVZ kernel is based on the Linux kernel, distributed under the GPL terms, and is
licensed under GNU GPL version 2. The license text can be found at
http://openvz.org/documentation/licenses/gnu-gpl
.
The user-level tools (
vzctl
,
vzquota
, and
vzpkg
) are licensed under the terms of the
QPL license. The license text can be found at
http://openvz.org/documentation/licenses/qpl
.
OpenVZ Configuration
OpenVZ allows you to flexibly configure various settings for the OpenVZ system in general as
well as for each and every Virtual Private Server. Among these settings are disk and user quota,
network parameters, default file locations and configuration sample files, and others.
OpenVZ stores the configuration information in two types of files: the global configuration file
/etc/sysconfig/vz
and VPS configuration files
/etc/sysconfig/vz-
scripts/
vpsid
.conf
. The global configuration file defines global and default parameters
for VPS operation, for example, logging settings, enabling and disabling disk quota for VPSs,
the default configuration file and OS template on the basis of which a new VPS is created, and
so on. On the other hand, a VPS configuration file defines the parameters for a given particular
VPS, such as disk quota and allocated resources limits, IP address and host name, and so on. In
case a parameter is configured both in the global OpenVZ configuration file, and in the VPS
configuration file, the VPS configuration file takes precedence. For a list of parameters
constituting the global configuration file and the VPS configuration files, turn to the
Reference
chapter.
The configuration files are read when OpenVZ and/or VPSs are started. However, OpenVZ
standard utilities, for example,
vzctl
, allow you to change many configuration settings “on-
the-fly”, either without modifying the corresponding configuration files or with their
modification (if you want the changes to apply the next time OpenVZ and/or VPSs are started).