System requirements

For this book, you are going to use CentOS 6.5 as the distribution OS in all the examples. You can also follow RHEL6.5, Scientific Linux, or Debian 7 along with this book. At the time of this writing, the OpenVZ kernel version that is available is vzkernel 2.6.32 and will be the OpenVZ kernel that is used throughout the rest of this book.

For hardware specifications, the following are recommended:

• IBM PC compatible computer
• Intel Core i7, Xeon E7, and AMD Opteron
• A minimum of 128 MB of RAM; 2 GB or more is recommended
• A hard drive with at least 80 GB of space
• A 10/100/1000 network card

For network specifications, the following are recommended:

• A local area network for the server
• A valid Internet connection
• A valid IP address for the server
• A valid IP address for each container

Note

Please note that the previously listed requirements are recommended to get you started with learning how to use OpenVZ. On a live server, you will want to increase the RAM and CPU as the number of your containers grows on the server. It is not unusual to see a server with three to four CPUs with two or more cores at 3.4 GHz per core and 90 GB of RAM.