OVH has a budget offering called So you start. If you want to install an operating system, that is not covered by the automatic installation, or want to encrypt your server, or install Linux with ZFS on root, you can’t use the provided installation mechanism. You can order a KVM over IP for additional costs to do the installation, or you can follow the following steps, to run the installation under Qemu/KVM. I took them from this forum entry, if you want to know more about it then click to read more:
#to see if Raid devices are present and stop them cat /proc/mdstat mdadm --stop /dev/md0 mdadm --stop /dev/md1 #Second step is to get rid of the network drives, because they are read-only mount -t tmpfs -o size=6000m tmpfs /mnt # use 6GB of memory as temp - adjust as needed mkdir /mnt/var mkdir /mnt/var/cache mkdir /mnt/var/lib mkdir /mnt/var/run mkdir /mnt/usr mkdir /mnt/lib rsync -a /var/cache/ /mnt/var/cache/ rsync -a /var/lib/ /mnt/var/lib/ rsync -a /var/run/ /mnt/var/run/ rsync -a /usr/ /mnt/usr/ rsync -a /lib/ /mnt/lib/ mount -B /mnt/var/cache /var/cache mount -B /mnt/var/lib /var/lib mount -B /mnt/var/run /var/run mount -B /mnt/usr /usr #Update your system apt-get -y update apt-get -y --force-yes upgrade #Install qemu + kvm apt-get -y install qemu kvm
Now that we have kvm installed, we can get for example an Ubuntu 14.04 Image and do the installation from there.
wget http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04.1/ubuntu-14.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso
Now we start kvm with vnc support and do the installation from there:
qemu-system-x86_64 -net nic -net user,hostfwd=tcp::80-:80 -m 2047M -alt-grab -localtime -enable-kvm -cpu kvm64,+nx -smp 2 -usbdevice tablet -k en-us -cdrom ubuntu-14.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso -hda /dev/sda -hdb /dev/sdb -vnc 127.0.0.1:0
The VNC Server will listen on localhost only, so that no one else can access it. You need to tunnel yourself with SSH through.
This is also helpful to start your server under KVM, to fix any boot issues you might have.