Greetings,

It's me again to mention OpenVZ.  I maintain some CentOS OS Templates for 
OpenVZ and update them on about a monthly basis.  I usually don't have trouble 
having an OS Template out for a new release on the day of the release (example 
CentOS 4.7 and 5.2).

You can find them here:

http://download.openvz.org/template/precreated/contrib/

You can actually find a number of OS Templates for CentOS on the openvz.org 
website but I believe mine (as you can see in the "contrib" directory) are the 
only ones that are refreshed periodically.  As I write this, the current ones 
are:

centos-4-i386-default-4.7-20081013.tar.gz   13-Oct-2008 22:40  108M
centos-4-x86_64-default-4.7-20081013.tar.gz 13-Oct-2008 22:43  115M
centos-5-i386-default-5.2-20081013.tar.gz   13-Oct-2008 22:47  117M
centos-5-x86_64-default-5.2-20081013.tar.gz 13-Oct-2008 22:50  124M

Those OS Templates probably have a little more software in them than some of 
the smaller ones (I like having links, mc, nano, and screen) and yes yum is 
installed.

While I don't have experience with any, it is my understanding that some/many 
commercial hosting providers that offer "VPS" accounts that are OpenVZ (or 
Parallels Virtuzzo Containers) based often have somewhat dated, minimalistic 
setups... often without yum even installed... which can be very problematic.  I 
know the IRC #centos channel on freenode really doesn't like to get questions 
from cut rate account VPS users running CentOS containers, especially if they 
are missing some somewhat common packages and don't have an easy way to install 
them (no yum).

Speaking of OpenVZ OS Templates but getting a little off topic with non-CentOS 
info, an OpenVZ community member (Robert Nelson) has been working on a new OS 
Template build system he calls "vzpkg2" and "pkg-cacher" (a modified version of 
Debian's apt-cacher) that makes it easy to build OS Templates for Fedora, 
CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu... 44 different combinations when you consider the 
various distro release versions and both the i386 and x86_64 arches.  While 
vzpkg2 is still hasn't been added as a stock OpenVZ package, I've been testing 
it and it works great.  It is easy to build YOUR OWN OS Templates from scratch 
and in a network efficient way (with the help of pkg-cacher).  I was able to 
build all 44 OS Templates in just a couple of hours with a broadband connection.

What's an OS Template?  Basically it is install media for a Linux distribution 
from which you can make a container in about a minute.  I did an interview with 
Robert Nelson and wrote up a more complete explanation on OS Templates which 
you can find here:

http://www.montanalinux.org/robert-nelson-interview.html

I really recommend using CentOS as an OpenVZ host node distro.  Why?  You can 
find out in the OpenVZ HOWTO I wrote for the CentOS wiki here:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Virtualization/OpenVZ

Questions, comments, suggestions?  Feel free to email me directly ([EMAIL 
PROTECTED]) or this list.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]
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