Editing VPS Management (section)

=== Start containers/VE's/VPSs ===
When the machine begins to start VE’s, it’s safe to leave the console and login via ssh. All virts should be set to auto start all the VEs after a crash. Further, most (newer) virts are set to “fastboot” it’s VE’s (to find out, do:
 grep -i fast /etc/sysconfig/vz 
and look for <tt>VZFASTBOOT=yes</tt>). If this was set prior to the machine’s crash (setting it after the machine boots will not have any effect until the vz service is restarted) it will start each ve as fast as possible, in serial, then go thru each VE (serially), shutting it down running a vzquota (disk usage) check, then bringing it back up. The benefit is that all VE’s are brought up quickly (within 15min or so depending on the #), the downside is a customer watching closely will notice 2 outages – 1st the machine crash, 2nd their quota check (which will be a much shorter downtime- on the order of a few minutes). 

Where “fastboot” is not set to yes (i.e on quar1), vz will start them consecutively, checking the quotas one at a time, and the 60th VE may not start until an hour or two later - this is not acceptable.

The good news is, if you run vzctl start for a VE that is already started, you will simply get an error: <tt>VE is already started</tt>.  Further, if you attempt to vzctl start a VE that is in the process of being started, you will simply get an error: unable to lock VE.  So, there is no danger in simply running scripts to start smaller sets of VEs.  If the system is not autostarting, then there is no issue, and even if it does, when it conflicts, one process (yours or the autostart) will lose, and just move on to the next one.

A script has been written to assist with ve starts: [[#startvirt.pl|startvirt.pl]] which will start 6 ve’s at once until there are no more left.  If startvirt.pl  is used on a system where “fastboot” was on,  it will circumvent the fastboot for ve’s started by startvirt.pl – they will go through the complete quota check before starting- therefore this is not advisable when a system has crashed. When a system is booted cleanly, and there's no need for vzquota checks, then startvirt.pl is safe and advisable to run.