OpenVZ Pushing for Linux Kernel Inclusion

RomanianClimber writes to tell us News.com is reporting that SWSoft is trying to get OpenVZ into the Linux kernel. OpenVZ is an operating system level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. From the article: "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. The companies' move to make OpenVZ partitioning standard in Linux is timely, said Pund-IT analyst Charles King."

That's the beauty of OSS

[TheAxeMaster]

If you want something in there, then by god, put it in there. There's no huge patchwork system that affects everyone using linux when one company wants to change the underlying functioning. They can do it, and sell it if they can, while the rest of us can go happily on our way not using it.

IP Rights secure on this?

[blastard]

Has there been a serious investigation of potential patent claims against OpenVZ. This looks like a potentially hazardous inclusion.

If due diligence has been done, and no problems on the horizon, then that's great. Just would hate to have something like this included and have it open up another SCO-like situation. Recognizing that one is Copyright based, and the other would probably be Patent, and in particular US patent based.

Xen

[chabotc]

Wasn't redhat doing a major Xen push too? Fedora Core 5 will include xen host and guest kernels plus xen3, and from what i heard their putting a major effort into getting that usable too.

Never bet on a single horse i guess?

Or am i missing something and are OpenVZ and Xen very different products? (doesn't sound like it)

Upside of Xen seems to be the ability to run *bsd and other OS's in guest domains too, no mention of this in OpenVZ

Galaxy

[msbsod]

Nice to see some progress in the Linux arena. But neither the quoted article nor the OpenVZ web site list too many alternative solutions. Here is one from another world (non-unix): OpenVMS [hp.com] Galaxy by Digital (now HP). Galaxy is part of OpenVMS, since more than half a decade.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/wiz_3191.html [hp.com] (check the date - 1999!)
http://www.s-and-b.ru/syshlp/vms_html/6512/6512pro .html [s-and-b.ru] (an early online documentation, hosted by on a non-Digital/HP system)
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/availability/index.html [hp.com] (Lots of information about High Availability/Disaster Tolerance)

"All the world's a stage" or was it "All the galaxy's a stage?"
http://scifi.about.com/library/weekly/aa022800b.ht m [about.com]

Re:This is an idea I like

[aevans]

You don't want a VPS.... but your hosting provider does, especially now that off the shelf hardware is so fast that under full load, if you divide the CPU by 10 or even 100 under lighter loads, your'e still I/O and network bound.

this has nothing on Solaris Zones

[Anonymous Coward]

well this will probably run multiple kernels, but probably means multiple times the work and the administration headaches, with Solaris Zones [blogspot.com] you share the kernel, but you only need to administer one core install of the OS.
 
A base install of Solaris in a zone, uses just 100MB of harddisk space. And on modern hardware takes less than 15 minutes per zone to install. Of course if you use the latest and greatest Solaris Express releases, you can use ZFS+Zones [blogspot.com] to cut the size of each zone down to 50MB of disk space, and zone creation time down to create a zone in 1 minute or less [sun.com]. You could also download and install brandz(Solaris patches that allows user to run Linux binaries in a Solaris Zone), and have even more choice. If you wish to debug your apps, you can use a stable dtrace and debug userland of both Solaris and Linux. And the Solaris kernel.

non-graphical interface?

[egburr]

What I'd really like to know is if there will be some way for me to ssh in to my server and "press" the power button for a virtual machine and have it start up. Or, will it require that I be able to export my display before I can start it up? And would there be any way to remotely grab the console of an already active virtual machine?

Re:Why is this needed?

[DShard]

1: hans?

2: Not just pay for but work with. This is the reason Xen has never really gotten into vanilla, even though it is supported directly by IBM, Intel and AMD.

Re:Anyone worried?

[Tony Hoyle]

It is... Virtuozzo is junk - my last host forced everyone to transfer to it (from UML, which was working fine for over a year).

Despite doubling the amount of available memory to everyone as a sweetner* it ran like a dog.. it was *really* slow - about half the speed of the UML solution. Sure it was pretty, but it spent most of its time spitting out 'out of resources' errors, and would randomly terminate applications - quite often the ssh server, meaning you had to keep rebooting... After 24 hours of almost solid downtime I (and a great many others with the same host) switched providers. I picked one that used Xen - which has been running sweetly ever since).

We don't *need* OpenVZ. Xen is much better already.

(* A sweetner not just because Virtuozzo was a resource hog, but because it couldn't do the same bandwidth management (previously we were on a 20mb link with 150gb/month.. vz had no way of doing that so they dropped us to a 512kb link - slower than my DSL line..)

Re:Pros and cons

[Anonymous Coward]

At first I couldn't even figure out what you were referring to, but I understand you are talking about the MythTV isolation and such. Xen does NOT require custom drivers to allow guests to talk to hardware under 2.x (and soon under 3.x), but rather it only allows one vm to talk to hardware that doesn't have a custom driver. In this case, that's what we'd prefer. Only one vm could sensibly talk to a video capture device (what would be the point of multiple ones?) but with Xen you can ensure that even a driver bug will not take down the whole system, just the one VM that is directly accessing that card. Xen can even restart the VM automatically. Under OpenVZ, the entire system would crash in that case.

As an example use case, (that has actually been documented as is currently in use) you might have one system that is handling your local web server, mysql server, mythtv backend, network firewall, and astrisk pbx. If the Myth backend crashes (as it sometimes does) you don't lose telephone service! That's a good thing. Usually the problem is with Myth itself, not the kernel driver, but by using Xen we can be safe even if the video capture driver (or something else in the kernel used specifically by the myth backend) crashes. OpenVZ can't do this, because it doesn't isolate the kernel used for different tasks.