Managing OpenVZ With The Vtonf Control Panel

6Jan/100

Managing OpenVZ With The Vtonf Control Panel

1 Preliminary Note

Make sure that you have OpenVZ set up on your CentOS 5.2 server, for example as shown in this tutorial: Installing And Using OpenVZ On CentOS 5.2

I've tried this on an i386 system; I don't know if Vtonf works on x86_64 systems as well - the INSTALL file that comes with Vtonf says no, but the Vtonf wiki doesn't mention anything like this...

2 Installing Vtonf

Before we install Vtonf, we must install some prerequisites:

yum install vzpkg expect

Then go to http://www.vtonf.com/downloads.html and download and install the latest Vtonf package, e.g. as follows:

cd /tmp
wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/vtonf/vtonfinstaller.1.0-beta1.tar.gz
tar xvfz vtonfinstaller.1.0-beta1.tar.gz
cd vtonfinstaller.1.0-beta1
./install

You will be asked a few questions:

Do you wish to start the installation procedure (y/n)? : <-- y

Select Yes to continue:

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Accept the Vtonf license:

Afterwards Vtonf is being installed:

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Type in a user name...

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... and a password that you want to use to log into the Vtonf control panel:

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Afterwards, the Vtonf installation finishes like this:

Vtonf control panel installation completed. Please login to the control panel from the following information
http://192.168.0.100:8001/
Login Name : admin
Password : howtoforge

Visit our forum : http://www.vtonf.com/forum/index.php

Get support : http://www.vtonf.com/support.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As you see, the installer tells you the URL where you can find the Vtonf control panel (http://192.168.0.100:8001/ in my case).

3 Using Vtonf

Open a browser and go to your Vtonf URL and log in:

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This is how the control panel looks. I will now describe the most important functions (although Vtonf is so easy to use that you'd most likely figure this out on your own). To create a new virtual machine, click on Create Node:

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Vtonf comes with one OS template, centos-4-i386-minimal, so pick this one, select a configuration file (e.g. vps.basic), and fill in a hostname and IP address (in the next chapter I will explain how to add further OS templates). Click on the Create Node button:

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A few seconds later you should see something like this which means that the VM has successfully been created:

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Under Node Listing, you should now see your new VM:

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You can create plans for your virtual machines (plans define properties like memory, disk space, etc.) and then create virtual machines using such a plan (the virtual machines created from such a plan would then all have the same properties). This has the advantage that you can create VMs very quickly without having to type in settings by hand before you create the VM:

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After you have created a VM, you can go to NODE MANAGEMENT and click on Node Start to start the VM. Select the VM from the drop-down menu and click on the Start button:

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After you've started a VM for the first time, you should set a root password for it (this must be done while the VM is running, not stopped). Go to SERVICES > Change Node Root Password, select the VM, and type in your desired root password twice:

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Under NODE NANAGEMENT > Set Nameservers, you should also define some nameservers for your VM (this can also be done while the VM is running) unless you've defined nameservers in a plan and created the VM from that plan:

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Vtonf is pretty self-explaining, so you can play around with the other options and find out what they do.

4 Adding OS Templates

Because Vtonf comes with only one OS template (centos-4-i386-minimal), you might want to add further ones. You can find a list of OS templates on http://wiki.openvz.org/Download/template/precreated. The OS templates must be stored in the /vz/template/cache directory, so let's download two further OS templates (CentOS 5 and Debian Etch):

cd /vz/template/cache
wget http://download.openvz.org/template/precreated/contrib/centos-5-i386-default.tar.gz
wget http://download.openvz.org/template/precreated/debian-4.0-i386-minimal.tar.gz

Afterwards we must make Vtonf read that directory again so that it knows that there are new OS templates. Go to VTONF > Update Settings...