Quoting Linux.com

This guide should by no means be considered a complete guide to getting started with OpenVZ.  However, Joe Brockmeier does everyone considering using the OpenVZ platform a serious favor here.  If you need to quickly get up and running, this guide should definitely be enough to get you down the working path without having to spend a whole lot of time reading through the Wiki or documentation.  Once you have a working VPS running, be sure to consult the Wiki or the man pages for more details.

Joe writes:

One of the many virtualization options for Linux is OpenVZ, the free software component of SWsoft's Virtuozzo. OpenVZ, and Virtuozzo, are OS-level virtualization solutions that allow you to partition servers into multiple virtual private servers (VPS). Plowing through the OpenVZ documentation can be a bit intimidating, so let's walk through the easy way of getting started with OpenVZ on a Debian Etch system.

Last year, I reviewed Virtuozzo 3.0 for Linux, and I'd had some hands-on experience with prior versions of Virtuozzo from my days working with a hosting company in Denver. My budget doesn't have room for the Virtuozzo licensing, but OpenVZ fits my pocketbook just fine.

When would you want to use OpenVZ rather than VMware Server or Xen? It depends on the situation. For tasks where you don't want to run multiple OSes, but rather just multiple guests, in order to make the most of hardware or provide separation between services (for instance, separating your Web server from your file and print server) with minimal overhead, OpenVZ is a good choice. However, when you want to run non-Linux operating systems (such as FreeBSD or Windows Server) on top of a Linux host, you'd want to go with VMware rather than OpenVZ (or its commercial and proprietary big brother, Virtuozzo), since OpenVZ doesn't offer the ability to run multiple OSes.

OpenVZ also supports more processor platforms than the alternatives. VMware Server and Xen are available for x86 and AMD64, while OpenVZ is available for x86, AMD64, Itanium (IA64), PowerPC, and UltraSPARC. Note that there are no pre-built PowerPC kernels for Debian at the moment, but OpenVZ is supported on PowerPC.

The guide helps with:

• Installing OpenVZ
• Setting up a guest system
• Managing OpenVZ
• And tearing it down when finished

Read the entire guide at Linux.com, here.