Eugen Leitl wrote:
Before I try OpenVZ I would like to hear comments of people
who've ran both VServer and OpenVZ, preferrably on the same
hardware, on how both compare.
Factors of interest are stability, Debian support,
hardware utilization, documentation and community support,
security.
As the owner of one of the larger VPS providers around we do use
Virtuozzo (commercial support, less work packaging, etc) although I am a
big fan of the VServer project.
For a hosting service I'd have to recommend Virtuozzo over either, as is
a large purpose of OpenVZ I believe :) If you feel you can do the work
to keep track of kernel changes, participate actively in debugging, etc
then VServer would be fine.
As far as the technical debate between the projects, I have more
interest in inputting on that.
1) "Fair scheduling" - as far as I can tell the VZ "fair scheduler" does
nothing the VServer QoS/Limit system does. If anything, the VZ fair
scheduler is not yet O(1) which is a big negative. VServer is built on
standard kernel and therefore uses the O(1) scheduler (an absolute must
when you have so many processes running on a single kernel).
2) Networking - The VZ venet0 is not perfect (no IPv6, still limited
iptables, etc), but it still allows a lot more to be performed than
VServer in the networking arena.
3) Disk/memory sharing - OpenVZ has nothing. Virtuozzo uses an overlay
fs "vzfs". The templates are good for an enterprise environment, but
really prove useless in a hosting environment. vzfs is overlay and
therefore suffers from double caching (it caches both files in
/vz/private (backing) and /vz/root (mount)). VServer uses CoW links
which are modified hard links and eliminates the double caching. The
Vserver vunify program (to re-link identical files due to user upgrading
to same RPM's across VPS's, etc) takes a few minutes to run. The
Virtuozzo vzcache program to do the same can take 2+ days to run on a
host with 60+ VPS's.
4) In most other areas OpenVZ and VServer are similar. OpenVZ has many
UBC's, but since most oversell some such as vmguarpages really have no
affect. Vserver limits the major memory limits (with RSS being a key
one that OpenVZ cannot do). On the flip side OpenVZ can limit lowmem
(kmemsize) while VServer cannot.
5) Quota inside VPS - The new way of linking the quota user/group files
to /proc in OpenVZ is very good (genius?) idea I think. Currently I'm
not even 100% sure quota-inside-VPS works under VServer, it's been a few
months since I've experimented with it or talked to Herbert.
So which is better? Neither, it depends what the user requires and what
they are willing and wanting to do.
My 2 cents..
Thanks,
Matt Ayres
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