[Users] Latest changes in OpenVZ project 20151117

[Sergey Bronnikov]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to share with you the news on the latest changes in Virtuozzo 7
development.

First of all, I want to remind everyone that we are very close to the second
beta of Virtuozzo 7. This milestone will include support for virtual machines
based on the KVM hypervisor.

* We continue working on documentation and recently published more Virtuozzo
guides [1], in particular:

- Command Line Reference
- Getting Started Guide
- Installation Guide
- Installation Using PXE
- Templates Management Guide

Please note that these documents are a work in progress. The sources are
available in the OpenVZ source repository [2]. Feel free to participate in
keeping the documentation up to date.

* Next, the source code of two new Virtuozzo components became available:
- libreport-plugin-virtuozzo, a plugin for libreport for gathering information
required for problem reports [3].
- coripper, a coredump stripper utility that reduces coredump size by stripping
parts of virtual memory while keeping a possibility to generate backtrace [4].

* As you may know, minimal templates are quite popular in OpenVZ-stable. One of
OpenVZ users, Philipp Born, made a minimal Debian template for Virtuozzo 7 using
the OpenVZ project source code. Thank you, Philipp, the template has been added
to the Virtuozzo 7 distribution [5].

* This July we asked OpenVZ users about their experience with SimFS and got much
feedback regarding pros and contras of SimFS and ploop storage backends [6].
Based on that, we prepared a comparison of SimFS and ploop CT storage backend
[7]. After an internal discussion, we decided to keep SimFS in Virtuozzo 7 and I
hope it will return in Beta 2. It is worth noting there are many other CT
storage backends, including ZFS, LVM and such. For various reasons, we cannot
include all of them in Virtuozzo 7 by default. However, we will provide a
possibility to use our containers with other CT storage backends. Stay tuned!

* New functionality has been added to Virtuozzo 7:
- Now CT starts in a new user namespace (requires testing) [8].
- prl_disk_tool is used to manage virtual machine and container disk images [9].

We do appreciate your helping us find bugs in the new functionality before the
official release!

* We compiled a table of all products and tools integrated with Virtuozzo/OpenVZ
[10]. Feel free to tell us of any other solutions OpenVZ is integrated with.

* Now you don't need a hardware node to install Virtuozzo 7 if you want to try it.
You can use Vagrant boxes or Amazon EC2 images instead [11].

* We recently stumbled upon a report on a thorough security audit of OpenVZ
performed by Alexander Peslyak aka Solar Designer as far back as 2005. He found
a single issue in the OpenVZ kernel code and a couple of issues in the
mainstream Linux kernel code. All of them were fixed and the mainstream fixes
were sent to the LKML. We decided to publish the report for everyone to see.

Links
=====
[1] https://docs.openvz.org/
[2] https://src.openvz.org/projects/OVZ/repos/vz-docs/browse
[3] https://github.com/OpenVZ/libreport-plugin-virtuozzo
[4] https://github.com/OpenVZ/coripper
[5] https://lists.openvz.org/pipermail/users/2015-October/006549.html
[6] https://lists.openvz.org/pipermail/users/2015-July/006307.html
[7] https://wiki.openvz.org/CT_storage_backends
[8] https://openvz.org/Start_CT_in_a_new_user_namespace:_1:1_user_mapping
[9] https://openvz.org/Prl-disk-tool_for_Virtuozzo_7
[10] https://openvz.org/Virtuozzo_ecosystem
[11] https://openvz.org/Quick_installation_of_Virtuozzo_7
[12] https://lists.openvz.org/pipermail/users/2015-October/006563.html

Sincerely,
Sergey