There are a few items required for installing vzdump for OpenVZ on CentOS.

First, you’ll need an MTA – I suggest making sure you have postfix installed; if you have postfix installed the initial RPM requirement for “MTA” will be handled for you. Next, you’ll need cstream. This installation is slightly more tricky because (as far as I know) there is no real way to gain this from yum unless you use the DAG Wieers repo. Also, depending on what you have already installed you will likely need the Simple Locking file I/O library for Perl.

Here is how you get vzdump on a clean version of CentOS (via the hostnode):

rpm -ivh "ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/pub/dag/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/RPMS.dag/cstream-2.7.4-3.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm"
wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/perl-LockFile-Simple/perl-LockFile-Simple-0.206-1.el5.rf.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh perl-LockFile-Simple-0.206-1.el5.rf.noarch.rpm
/bin/rm perl-LockFile-Simple-0.206-1.el5.rf.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh "http://chrisschuld.com/centos54/vzdump-1.2-6.noarch.rpm"

Since version 1.2-6 of vzdump the location of the modules is not “automatic” and have found it necessary to export the location of the PVE libraries that vzdump requires via this command:

export PERL5LIB=/usr/share/perl5/

All said and done there has to be a better way to do this… anyone… anyone??

NOTE: 7/19/2010 – Proxmox updated their site… I updated all of the links!