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Basic operations in OpenVZ environment
This article assumes you have already installed OpenVZ. If not, follow the link to perform the steps needed.

Create and start a container
To create and start a container, run the following commands:

[host-node]# vzctl create CTID --ostemplate osname
[host-node]# vzctl set CTID --ipadd a.b.c.d --save
[host-node]# vzctl set CTID --nameserver a.b.c.d --save
[host-node]# vzctl start CTID
Here CTID is the numeric ID for the container; osname is the name of the OS template for the container, and a.b.c.d is the IP address to be assigned to the container.

Example:

[host-node]# vzctl create 101 --ostemplate fedora-core-5-minimal
[host-node]# vzctl set 101 --ipadd 10.1.2.3 --save
[host-node]# vzctl set 101 --nameserver 10.0.2.1 --save
[host-node]# vzctl start 101
Your freshly-created container should be up and running now; you can see its processes:

[host-node]# vzctl exec CTID ps ax
Enter to and exit from the container
To enter container give the following command:

[host-node]# vzctl enter CTID
entered into container CTID
[container]#
To exit from container, just type exit and press Enter:

[container]# exit
exited from container VEID
[host-node]#
Stop and destroy the container
To stop container:

[host-node]# vzctl stop CTID
Stopping container ...
Container was stopped
Container is unmounted
And to destroy container:

[host-node]# vzctl destroy CTID
Destroying container private area: /vz/private/CTID
Container private area was destroyed
Listing Containers
Very often you may want to get an overview of the Containers existing on the given Hardware Node and to get additional information about them — their IP addresses, hostnames, current resource consumption, etc. In the most general case, you may get a list of all Containers by issuing the following command:

# vzlist -a
CTID NPROC STATUS IP_ADDR HOSTNAME
101 10 running 10.101.66.101 server101.mydomain.com
102 - stopped 10.101.66.102 server102.mydomain.com
103 5 running 10.101.66.103 server103.mydomain.com
The -a switch tells the vzlist utility to output both running and stopped Containers. By default, only running Containers are shown. The default columns inform you of the Container IDs, the number of running processes inside Containers, their status, IP addresses, and hostnames. This output may be customized as desired by using vzlist command line switches. For example:

# vzlist -o ctid,diskinodes.s -s diskinodes.s
CTID DQINODES.S
101 400000
103 200000
This shows only running Containers with the information about their IDs and soft limit on disk inodes (see the Managing Resources chapter for more information), with the list sorted by this soft limit. The full list of the vzlist command line switches and output and sorting options is available in the vzlist(8) man page.