A push is under way to endow Linux with a virtual partitioning technology used by rival operating systems to make servers more efficient. SWsoft is trying to get OpenVZ made part of the mainstream Linux kernel – the software at the heart of the operating system – and a part of the major commercial Linux versions, said Kirill Korotaev, a project manager at the company. In this, it has a major ally: Red Hat, the top seller of the open-source operating system, which plans to add the software to its free Fedora version of Linux for enthusiasts.
Didn’t everybody else already decide to go with Xen?
Xen allows multiple operating systems, or instances of the same operating system, to run at the same time. Each instance has its own kernel, each one loads its own libc into memory, and so on.
OpenVZ and VServer each run multiple partitions. A process inside a partition cannot see the processes in the other partitions, but all the partitions share the same kernel. With careful design of memory usage, this approach can be much more memory-efficient than Xen, but obviously it offers a lesser degree of isolation between partitions than Xen does between its operating systems.
Well the Xen team hasn’t go their code ready to go into the mainline kernel. SWsoft has OpenVZ ready to go into mainline right now. I think xen is the better solution, but thats just from my limited experience
Although Virtuozzo is “built on top of OpenVZ”, is Virtuozzo’s kernel component a publicly available version of OpenVZ, built without using any proprietary patches or modules?
http://openvz.org/documentation/tech/virtuozzo
states “Differently from OpenVZ, Virtuozzo™ is developed and designed to run production workloads in 24×7 environments …”
and goes on to list, among Virtuozzo’s advantages over OpenVZ:
“Higher VPS density. Virtuozzo™ provides efficient memory and file sharing mechanisms enabling higher VPS density and better performance of VPSs.
“Improved Stability, Scalability, and Performance. Virtuozzo™ is designed to run 24×7 environments with production workloads on hosts with up-to 32 CPUs.”
Why should Linux accept a kernel patch if (unlike Linux itself) it is not designed to run 24×7 environments with production workloads on hosts with up-to 32 CPUs?
linux-vserver don’t do same thing ?
Wich one is better ?
I could finally repartition my main / partition without needing a bootdisc. Why can’t it schedule my partition instructions for reboot as a one time cron job or something so I can resize any partition on my drive, and not be excluded from mucking with my main partition without a boot disc.
This article has nothing to do with disk volume partitioning, it’s talking about partitioning compute resources (CPU/memory/buses).
Xen and OpenVZ should coexist peacefully in the corporate IT market, the former primarily for improving resource utilization, service availability, and platform flexibility, and the latter primarily for service isolation and management. Xen has done a markedly better job, relative to OpenVZ/Virtuozzo, of not appearing so… commercial, which at least partially accounts for why Xen jives with Linux kernel developers. In addition, OS-level virtualization is inherently more kernel-intrusive than hardware virtualization, which accounts for the mainline commit challenges.
By the way, if you want more flexible disk volume management on Linux, you should use EVMS/LVM.
http://lwn.net/Articles/162684/
OpenVZ seem to be better than VServer.