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Note: This Howto is in its early stage of development. At the moment it is mainly just a copy of a message I posted to the mailing list about the gotchas I found in virtualizing an old Red Hat 6.2 box to run as a vserver on a Red Hat 9 machine. (Chuck)

Virtualizing for Fun & Profit

Virtualize: Convert a standard Linux server (i.e. one of them on a physical machine) to run as a vserver inside another physical server (called the host server).

Why? Because running as a vserver gives you: simplified Backup, very neat Failover (rsync the vserver to another box, then when the main servers just run "vserver <vserver> start"), & easy Upgrade possibilities (create another vserver with a newer distro, migrate files/users across at your leisure).

How? That's what this document is for! There are three steps:

  1. Patch the host server kernel.
  2. Install the vserver tools on the host server.
  3. rsync your old server to /vservers/oldserver/ on the host server.
  4. Configure /etc/vservers/oldserver.conf.
  5. Enter the vserver and modify the configuration so it'll work as a vserver.

Information on patching the kernel and installing the vserver tools should be somewhere else on this site. Rsyncing isn't too difficult (but maybe I'll add details later). So I'll start at number 4, configuring the vserver.

VServer Configuration (/etc/vservers/<vserver>.conf)

Inside the VServer

(Run "vserver oldvserver enter" to get into the vserver. Don't make these changes on the host server!)

Finally, once everything is working well:


So all in all there aren't many general settings to be changed after you rsync the server into a vserver. I found the resolver issues and the named permissions problem took the most time to fix. Give it a go - there's not much to lose!