Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenVZ

Collapse
1: OpenVZ
Posted by Steve Manning on 09/17/05 10:34 PM
I came across OpenVZ recently and thought I'd post up the details as it might be useful to anyone wanting to run virtual servers:-

http://openvz.org/

OpenVZ is an Operating System-level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. OpenVZ creates isolated, secure virtual private servers (VPSs) or virtual environments on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each VPS performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; VPSs can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.

- Steve

Collapse
2: OpenVZ looks like Linux VServer (like FreeBSD Jail) (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 09/20/05 09:57 AM
Their tech docs don't actually say, but it sounds very much like "OpenVZ" may simply be using the Linux VServer patches. VServer and related technologies have been discussed at least four times here before, and at least one OpenACS hosting provider has been using it successfully for a long time.
Collapse
3: Re: OpenVZ (response to 1)
Posted by Patrick Giagnocavo on 09/20/05 03:14 PM
Having set up and used both Linux Vserver and Solaris Zones (a new feature in Solaris 10), I can very strongly recommend zones as being far superior.

The one thing that a zone cannot do is run a different version of the OS - that is, each zone can only be a Solaris 10 instance.

However, OS patches, new packages, etc. can be installed once and made available to all instances immediately; and the disk space used is the space taken by the package, plus a few KBytes for each zones package database.

And yes, inittab works properly inside a Solaris zone, unlike the possibly strange behavior you will run into under a vserver.

Collapse
4: Re: OpenVZ (response to 1)
Posted by Dmitry Mishin on 09/22/05 09:54 AM
OpenVZ is definitely not Vserver-based.
Moreover, Virtuozzo/OpenVZ historically precedes vserver:
Virtuozzo/OpenVZ was started in 1999, first sources were made public in 2000 and the production version (1.0) was released in 2001. AFAIK, vserver project started only in 2001.

Vserver and OpenVZ code is very different.
The similarities exist only in the ideas and approaches, because they both provide virtualization. However, if the similarities have other reasons than the same task of these two projects, the ideas probably migrated in the opposite direction than what you imply, from OpenVZ to vserver. But I'm not certain if it really took place.

Collapse
5: Re: Re: OpenVZ (response to 3)
Posted by Gory Details on 09/24/05 04:50 PM
OpenVZ in fact superior in capabilities to both Zones and Vserver, especially from manageability point of view. OpenVZ is derived from Virtuozzo, which is being used in commecial production since 2001 - and a lot of user-suggested improvements went into it ever since.