Linux Container
Introduction
NOTE: BETA Technology preview
A Linux Containers is an operating-system-level virtualization environment for running multiple isolated Linux systems on a single Linux control host (Wikipedia LXC). It can be be also defined as a lightweight VM but extremely fast and easy to deploy.
There is not much overhead and therefore the perfect solution for effective use of resources.
No extra kernel boot is necessary on startup resulting in a super fast boot.
Linux Containers are introduced in Proxmox VE 4.0 and supports the Proxmox Storage Model.
System requirements
- Proxmox VE 4.0 or higher
Features
- Support of local directories, NFS, ZFS, LVM (future support for Sheepdog, Ceph, iSCSI, DRBD and GlusterFS is planned)
- manipulate disk size
- Coming soon: snapshot, rollback, clone, linked clone (all these features need storage support)
- Kernel namespaces (ipc, uts, mount, pid, network and user)
- Apparmor profiles
- Seccomp policies
- Chroots (using pivot_root)
- Kernel capabilities
- CGroups (control groups)
- Migration
- Backup and restore
- Integrated firewall
- Network support for VLAN, IPv4, IPv6
Supported OS
- Debian 5, 6, 7
- CentOS 6
- RHEL 6
Other OS are following step by step.
Manage containers
The management via command line is possible with the pct tool. But most commands can be managed via GUI.
Get a container template
All templates can be downloaded at the GUI.
NOTE: Only the supported OS work
Create container
To create a container you need a container template. described below!
A GUI wizard will guide you through the creation process.
It is also possible to create a container with the pct command line tool. More details see manpages
pct create 112 /var/lib/vz/template/cache/debian-7.0-standard_7.0-2_i386.tar.gz -description LXC -disk 4 -hostname pvecontainer01 -memory 1024 -nameserver 8.8.8.8 -net0 hwaddr=52:4A:5E:26:58:D7,ip=192.168.15.83/24,gw=192.168.15.1,bridge=vmbr0 -storage local -password xxxxxx
Start container
There are two possabilities to start a container:
either on the GUI or on the command line
pct start 100
Stop container
Stopping a container can be done in a similar way like starting a container.
pct stop 100
Backup container
The backup can be done in three different modes: snapshot, suspend and stopped. This mode options have only an effect if the container is running.
Snapshot mode: this feature depends on the filesystem and so it must support snapshots. If snapshot mode is chosen but it's not supported by the filesystem the backup will be done in suspend mode.
Suspend mode: the container will be frozen during the time the backup is running. NOTE: Container is not running untill backup is done!
Stopped mode: the container will be turned off and restarted after backup.
The command line tool backing up Linux container is vzdump. For more information read vzdump manpage.
vzdump 100 -compress lzo -dumpdir /var/lib/vz/dump/ -mode snapshot -remove 0
Restore container
It is easy and fast to restore a container.
On the GUI it is only possible to restore a container with the same VMID and if there is no VM with this VMID.
If you need to change the VMID or override a VM you can use the command line tool pct.
For more information read the man page of pct. <pve> pct restore 101 /var/lib/vz/dump/vzdump-lxc-100-2015_06_22-11_12_40.tar.lzo