My first Linux installation took place circa 1992, I pulled my hair out for a month or so while I was trying to figure out how to install this very interesting and FREE operating system.

I considered myself an intermediate level user who at this point was trying to learn how to program using the C programming language. Why not C++? At the time all the "beginners" books assumed that you knew the C programming language.

I was reading an article somewhere, probably in the now "merged" C/C++ user's Journal, that introduced an operating system that was "built for programmers by programmers". Needless to say, the best place to learn how to solve coding problems or learn about coding was to look at working code.

A whole operating system with the code! Perfect.

This video comes from the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group and is dated Nov. 7, 2007. Pretty darn interesting for us non-programmer types who want a better idea of the structure of the Linux kernel.

Introduction

About a year ago a large shipment of servers arrived at MSU for the use in a new grid and cluster system for students and faculty of the Montana State University Computer Science department. Once the servers were opened from their boxes we realized that installing the operating system of our choice was going to be complicated considering the units were "engineering samples" and were never used in production. Also each unit was a 1U form factor with no external media device (CDR/DVD/etc). On the newer PIV-Xeon systems (referred to as Server Type 1) the install was not as complicated as originally anticipated. On the other hand the installation of Gentoo on the older Dual-PIII systems (referred to as Server Type 2) was more complicated due to the alpha version of the BIOS installed on the systems.

The tutorial you are currently reading has been broken into 6 different parts to help with captivating the reader at the same time as describing short-cut techniques that were learned along the way (ha ha, captivating). By the end of this tutorial one should grasp the basic concept of how to build a cluster and some simple tricks to make maintaining a cluster easier in the life of a cluster administrator.

OpenVZ and KVM are Linux based virtualization programs, both are part of the Proxmox VE distribution. The goal of this article is to provide some knowledge on moving physical machines to virtual containers (OpenVZ) or fully virtualized machines (KVM). This article is not specific to Proxmox VE and the principles outlined and scripts provided should work on "stock" KVM or OpenVZ machines with a few minor changes to path settings.

I wrote up a HOWTO for the CentOS wiki entitled, Installing and using OpenVZ on CentOS 5, and thought I would share it here as well.

Please note that the OpenVZ kernel is a product of the OpenVZ Project 
and is NOT supported by CentOS. The OpenVZ Project follows the RHEL 
kernels closely and provides updates in a somewhat timely fashion 
after updated Red Hat (and CentOS) kernels are released. As a result 
the RHEL-based OpenVZ kernels are well suited for use on RHEL and 
CentOS hosts with support for (almost) all of the same hardware. 
Please note though that the OpenVZ kernel is less modular than the 
stock Red Hat / CentOS kernels with some hardware support being 
compiled in. 

It is recommended you read this HOWTO in its entirety before 
attempting any of the operations shown in it.

What is OpenVZ?

OpenVZ is operating system-level virtualization based on a modified Linux kernel that allows a physical server to run multiple isolated instances known as containers, virtual private servers (VPS), or virtual environments (VE). The preferred term these days is container. Containers are sometimes compared to chroot or jail type environments but containers are really much better in terms of isolation, security, functionality, and resource management.

OpenVZ consists of a custom Linux kernel (available from the OpenVZ Project) and some user-level tools. OpenVZ is very portable, does not rely on VT support in the CPU, and as a result it is available for a number of CPU families including x86, x86-64, IA-64, PowerPC and SPARC.

OS-level virtualization is quite different from machine / hardware virtualization products such as VMware Server, Parallels Workstation, VirtualBox, QEMU, KVM, and Xen in that with OpenVZ you can only do Linux on Linux virtualization.

OpenVZ modifies the Linux kernel to add advanced containerization features which allow for isolated groups of processes under a parent init along with about twenty dynamic resource management parameters for controlling container resource usage. The OpenVZ Project maintains three stable kernel branches:

1. RHEL4 / CentOS4 2.6.9 based
2. RHEL5 / CentOS 5 2.6.18 based
3. Vanilla 2.6.18 based

There are a number of unstable branches based on newer versions of the Linux kernel that may eventually reach stable status.

Lewis and Clarke Library 7-9 PM

Topic Wireless

NOTE TIME CHANGE !!!!!!!!

I was in the middle of doing an rsync backup of the server when I lost communications with it. I did a few traceroutes and filed a trouble ticket with the colocation service. Follow along to see what happened.

Proxmox VE is an example of the end product being greater than the sum of parts. All the technologies used to build Proxmox VE are not unique however putting them all together and adding a nice interface is. Overall I am very impressed with the ease of use and quality of the software. The flexibility that is provided by virtualization plus the ease of administration provided by Proxmox VE is a great combination for anybody looking to use virtualization.

Dan, Warren and I returned Monday afternoon from the Linuxfest Northwest 2008 event. What follows is my review of the show.

Introduction

For those unfamiliar with the Linuxfest Northwest, it is an annual, two-day event held at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, Washington on the last weekend in April. It has become a hub of Linux activity in the Northwest with several of the Washington area Linux Users Groups supporting it. Visitors seem to come from all over the country especially those places that don't have a Linux conference anywhere near them. I also attended the LFNW last year so a bit of this review compares this year with last.

Let's get this out of the way... it was obvious that there were less visitors to the show this year than last year. I haven't seen any numbers published yet though. While that might sound bad it did make for a better show as it allowed for more time with the presenters and the exhibit booth folks.

Slides PDFI'm all done with making the slides for my presentation on OS Virtualization vs. Hardware Virtualization for the Linuxfest Northwest 2008 conference.

Check out photos in the photo gallery. Thanks goes to Warren for letting me borrow his camera. All photos are licensed under a Creative Commons license so do with them what you will.

Update: Ok, here's the video of my presentation.