Container management with LXC
Worlds Apart
© Lead Image © Kheng Ho Toh, 123RF.com
Chroot lets you run a largely autonomous guest system on a computer, without the need to emulate hardware. The LXC container management tool refines this technique with a comprehensive range of additional functions.
Chroot seals off parts of a directory tree against a break-out, thus isolating users, groups, or special services in an area that is harmless for the rest of the system. FreeBSD refined the concept with "Jails," Solaris with "Zones," and Linux with container services such as LXC [1]. LXC does not use virtual machines, like VMware, but creates a virtual environment with its own processes, but using a shared kernel on the host system.
Getting Started
The following exercise uses Debian 8.0 "jessie" as the host, but it can also be transferred to other systems like openSUSE or Ubuntu with minor changes.
To begin, you need to install the lxc, lxctl, and libvirt-bin packages, including the dependencies required by the package manager (e.g., debootstrap). If you have a custom kernel, you need to enable control groups (cgroups), which you can check with the command:
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