VServer is not Xen

Recently I had to work on a Virtual Machine (VM) running on VServer. In the past I used Xen to create virtual machines but due to the nature of the task VServer seemed more appropriate. I only have to run two Debian Etch VM's on a Debian Etch host. Because of the much narrower interface to the Operation System (OS) it makes sense for VServer hosts to run without much of the overhead - and therefore faster as well.

There are a few things that are quite nice about the lesser abstraction of VServer compared to Xen. For example copying a Virtual Machine is much simpler I found and files can be copied into place from the master because the file system of the VM's are simply directories of the master file system.

One thing I noticed is though that it is much more difficult to run certain daemons in the VM's and/or the master at the same time. The separation in Xen completely splits master and VM on the kernel level, running the same daemon on the same port is a natural fit. Nothing to be done. Not so with VServer.

I tried to run SSH, NTP and SNMP on the master and the two VM's I tried to set up. First issue I ran into was SSH. SSH on the master is listening on all network addresses, configured as such:

ListenAddress 0.0.0.0

When you now try to start the SSH daemon on the VM's you get an error that the address is already in use - by the master of course! Master and Virtual Machines share the network layer and this is now causing a problem.

The issue in itself is solved by setting the listening address to a specific one, namely the address of the master:

ListenAddress 192.168.1.100

Then it binds to the default socket only on that interface and the VM's are free to bind their daemons to their IP.

The second issue I ran into is NTP. I tried to run it the same way as the SSH daemon, but since the listening address is not something you can specify in the /etc/ntp.conf the NTP daemon is binding to all interfaces and we have the same error on the VM's as mentioned above.

I found it best to remove NTP completely from the VM's and only run it on the master. It seems after a few weeks of observation that the time is "passed" on to the VM's, in other words their time stays in sync. This somewhat makes sense considering the thin layer VServer has to run the Virtual Machines. They simply use the same internal clock and if the master is in sync then so are the VM's.