[Users] Re: [Vserver] VServer vs OpenVZ

Kir Kolyshkin kir at openvz.org
Wed Dec 7 01:05:13 EST 2005


Let me comment on that as well (ccing our users@ mailing list). Sure I'm 
biased as well :)

Herbert Poetzl wrote:

>On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 01:20:13PM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>  
>
>>Factors of interest are 
>>- stability, 
>>    
>>
>
> Z: the announcement reads "first stable OVZ version"
>  
>
Although this is indeed the first stable OpenVZ release, OpenVZ is 
essentially Virtuozzo (without its bells and whistles), and Virtuozzo 
for Linux is available for more than five years already.

> S: we are at version 2.0.1 (> two years stable releases)
>
>  
>
>>- Debian support, 
>>    
>>
>
> Z: afaik they are redhat oriented (and recently
>    trying to get gentoo support done)
>  
>
Certainly you can compile OpenVZ from sources and use it on any Linux 
distro. And yes, we are a part of Gentoo for about two months already 
(with all the recent releases making their way into Gentoo in a very 
timely fashion).

Debian is one of our goals (see roadmap 
<http://openvz.org/development/roadmap>), although personally I am not a 
Debian expert, still with some help from the Debian community we will 
make it.

> S: L-VS is in sarge (although with older/broken packages)
>    but either using recent packages or compiling the tool
>    yourself works pretty fine on debian
>
>  
>
>>- hardware utilization, 
>>    
>>
>
> Z: no idea
> S: support for 90% of all kernel archs at (almost) native
>    speed (utilization? I'd say 100% if required)
>  
>

OpenVZ is supporting x86 (i386), x86_64 (AMD64, EM64T) and ia64 
platforms. "Supporting" here means we have enough hardware for all the 
three platforms, and do an extensive quality testing (functionality, 
performance and stress tests) and security audit on all of them. It's a 
pity but we can not provide the same level of support for other 
platforms than those three.

Speaking of specific hardware, we are supporting the same set of 
hardware that RHEL4 does, achieving this by backporting newer drivers 
from mainstream, vendors and RHEL4 kernels. There is an official 
Virtuozzo/OpenVZ HCL <http://virtuozzo.com/en/products/virtuozzo/hcl>.

>>- documentation and 
>>    
>>
>
> Z: no idea
> S: the wiki, the L-VS paper(s) and google
>  
>
There is an extensive 100-pages user's guide 
(http://openvz.org/documentation/guides/).
Also all utilities has man pages, and there are some short to-the-point 
howtos on the site and the forum.

We are working on more stuff, like QoS (User 
Beancounters/FairScheduler/Disk Quota) paper.

>  
>
>>- community support,
>>    
>>
>
> Z: irc channel and forum/bug tracker
> S: ML, irc channel (I guess we have excellent support)
>  
>
There is a bug tracking (Bugzilla) and quite an active support forums, 
also we have mailing lists and IRC channel (#openvz at freenode). We 
also provide fee-based support for OpenVZ, done by the same excellent 
team who supports Virtuozzo.

>  
>
>>- security.
>>    
>>
>
> guess both projects are trying to keep high security
> and IMHO the security is at least as high as with the
> vanilla kernel release ...
>  
>
I can definitely say our security is higher than that of vanilla kernel. 
We achieve that by two means: (1) sticking to older kernel and 
backporting all the fixes from mainstream and (2) hiring top-rated 
security specialists to do OpenVZ security audit.

Regards,
  Kir, OpenVZ project leader.


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