Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Installing OpenVZ on Fedora 11

This describes how to install the OpenVZ virtualization kernel and software on a Fedora 11 system. Instead of using the default rhel5 stable OpenVZ kernel, we'll be using the experimental 2.6.27 OpenVZ kernel.

EXT4 Warning: the 2.6.27 OpenVZ kernel does not have support for ext4 compiled in; your life will be easier if you install Fedora 11 onto an ext3 partition rather than the default ext4.
update April 2010: OpenVZ developers have backported the ext4 driver for 2.6.27 and released 2.6.32 kernels, so this should no longer be an issue.

  1. setup the openvz.repo as described in the OpenVZ quick install instructions
  2. edit the /etc/yum.repos.d/openvz.repo file and change the [openvz-kernel-2.6.27] section to enabled=1
  3. change the [openvz-kernel-rhel5] section to enabled=0
  4. the 2.6.27 kernel is older than Fedora 11's 2.6.29 kernel, so you need to force the install using this yum plugin:
    yum install yum-allowdowngrade

  5. finally, you may install the kernel and utlilities
    yum install vzkernel --alow-downgrade
    yum install vzctl
  6. don't forget to edit /etc/grub.conf and give the kernel a sensible name, such as "OpenVZ"

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

CORE 3.5 released

A new 3.5 release of CORE is available.

To obtain the software, visit:
http://cs.itd.nrl.navy.mil/work/core/
http://downloads.pf.itd.nrl.navy.mil/core/packages/3.5/

This is mostly a maintenance and bugfix release aimed at improving stability. The main improvements over the previous version are:
  • improved stability on Linux with OpenVZ
  • fixed distributed emulation (batch mode) on FreeBSD
    (note that distributed emulation from one GUI is not yet supported inthe Linux version)
  • various bugfixes
  • new global startup script supported
  • init/rc.d scripts used to start CORE daemons

The FreeBSD kernel and Quagga packages remain unchanged from CORE 3.4.
VMware images of both the FreeBSD and Linux versions are now available.