Announcing TurnKey OpenVZ optimized builds (+ Proxmox VE channel)

OpenVZ and Proxmox VE has been a recurring topic of discussion on the forums, for which we have Jeremy to blame thank. He's done tons of research, testing, preaching, and then some.

What I love about Open Source is that if you have an itch, and the drive to scratch it yourself, you can.

That's exactly what Jeremy and Adrian did. They wanted OpenVZ optimized builds for their Proxmox VE deployments, so they developed a TKLPatch that would convert an ISO into an OpenVZ container. And if that wasn't enough, took the time to upload some of the builds to sourceforge so it would be easier for others to leverage their work.

Hats off to you guys, you rock!

TurnKey OpenVZ optimized builds

Based on Adrian's and Jeremy's work, we were able to add OpenVZ support to our build infrastructure in no time, and after some initial testing, triggered the whole appliance library to be built as optimized OpenVZ containers.

You can get them from the "Download -> More Builds" link on the appliance pages.

Pre-seeding / default passwords

Because OpenVZ builds are used in headless deployments (without a console), they include an inithook which preseeds default values and passwords (excluding the root password which is handled by the VZ CLI tools).

/usr/lib/inithooks/firstboot.d/29preseed

DB_PASS=turnkey
APP_PASS=turnkey
APP_EMAIL=admin@example.com
APP_DOMAIN=DEFAULT
HUB_APIKEY=SKIP
SEC_UPDATES=FORCE

Depending on your use case, you can preseed the values before the system is booted for the first time, or once the system has booted by executing turnkey-init.

It would be great if someone would add preseeding support to PVE... 

TurnKey Proxmox VE channel

A while back the Proxmox folks came up with the idea of adding a TurnKey channel to PVE, to allow users to download TKL appliances in the same way their custom built appliances are downloaded.

It was a great idea, but unfortunately it never got off the ground.

As I mentioned above, the great thing about Open Source is that you can scratch your own itch, and I was curious how the channel mechanism worked - so I dived in. When I came up for air I had added minimal third party channel support and a TurnKey Linux channel (github).

What this basically means is you can now download and deploy any TurnKey appliance on your PVE server in a couple of clicks without leaving your browser.

I hope to see this integrated in the upcoming PVE 2.0 release [update: it's coming...]. If you're running PVE 1.9 then you can add the TurnKey channel as follows:

cd /usr/share/perl5/PVE
mv APLInfo.pm APLInfo.pm.bak
wget https://raw.github.com/turnkeylinux/pve-patches/master/PVE/APLInfo.pm

# update appliance list
pveam update