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LinuxWorld Boston

It was a big successful event for us. I met a lot of people interested in OS-level virtualization we do, talked a lot explaining the inner workings of OpenVZ kernel, did a live demos running about 100 VEs on my ThinkPad laptop, and visited some booths in the dot-org pavillion. I am really unhappy about the fact I have to leave it half an hour to catch the plane back to Moscow.

At the same time, right from the booth, I released yet a few more SUSE 10 kernels, an updated Fedora Core 5 kernel, and filed a few bugs, including one for Fedora Core 5 (#188160).

Finally, it is a great honour that Virtuozzo product received the "Best Virtualization Solution" from the LinuxWorld yesterday!

LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, Boston

I will at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston next week, from April 4th till April 6th, at the SWsoft's booth. So if anybody wants to meet me, feel free to come by.

Last week was full of new releases for OpenVZ. This week is more quiet, but don't be fooled. We have release three(!) consecutive updates to the SUSE 10 kernel. SUSE 10 kernel is in beta, so they do frequent releases, and we try to follow their latest kernels. Germany IT portal heise.de noted we released somewhat old (about ten days old) kernel, but this is not true anymore. Well, at least as of now — SUSE guys will probably release an updated kernel tomorrow. :)

openvz weekly news, kinda

This week was a huge move forward for the OpenVZ project. We have released an updated vzctl, an updated stable kernel, a new development kernel based on 2.6.16, a SUSE kernel, a template for Fedora Core 5 (FC5 was itself released 20 Mar), and finally a GIT repository with our development kernel.

The GIT repository serves two purposes. First one is to make our development process more open and transparent — indeed, now everybody can track our progress, see all those patches while they are being added, in a real time, not just after a release. And if you want to stay on the cutting edge of OpenVZ, do a git clone and then a regular git pull. GIT docs are here.

Second purpose of GIT is to help us with the mainstream integration. For that, there is a linux-2.6-openvz-ms project added, which contains just stuff needed to be added into mainstream. Kirill Korotaev has already submitted a couple of patches for IPC and utsname virtualization (which is quite straightforward and can be agreed upon more easily). Like in the previous round, it received a lot of attention and comments since different people/groups have different approaches and usage cases in mind. We believe it will work out fine, since we are reacting to the comments trying to make the code as excellent as possible and satisfy everybody.

Running OpenVZ on Debian

For those Debian users out there, Till Brehm has put together what appears to be a comprehensive guide to installing OpenVZ on Debian Sarge.

See: Building A Virtual Server (VPS) With Debian 3.1 (Sarge) And OpenVZ

Obligatory quote:
In this HowTo I will describe the steps to be taken to prepare a server for OpenVZ virtual machines on Debian 3.1 (Sarge) 32Bit Linux. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers.

a hot week for OpenVZ

This is going to be a hot week for OpenVZ.

Today is Monday, and for a nice start we have released an updated versions of the kernel (stable branch) and vzctl. I recommend everybody to upgrade the kernel, since it contains some security fixes (ported from mainstream). Yes, this is mostly fixes, and mostly from mainstream.

My crystal ball shows me that tomorrow, Tuesday, we will release a shiny 2.6.16-based kernel. Note that vanilla 2.6.16 was just released today, so we are quite up to speed. [OK I'll tell you the truth: we actually used a time machine to get the 2.6.16 sources two or three weeks ago, so we had a plenty of time to port.]

The week will continue with more releases...hmm, my crystal ball becomes kinda foggy. Well... I can still see something resembling a chameleon. Or is it lizard?

We will certainly see. Stay tuned.

Xen, kernel modules and code contributions

Red Hat went out public to say loudly about Xen and their plans about that. There is a nice virtualization introduction demo (you need Flash to see it) on their openvirtualization.com site. I have just noticed that if you change the word "Xen" to "OpenVZ", and remove anything concerning "hypervisor", it would be quite an accurate description of what OpenVZ is and what it can do for you. So I welcome everybody to see that demo.

Still, Xen is a bit different. Say, you can not load kernel modules from inside an OpenVZ VPS, or use different kernels for diffrerent VPSs on the same box — but this is possible with Xen.

That leads to the question: what if you need some special kernel module in OpenVZ? The answer is: if it is a device driver and you want to use that device from within one VPS, it is possible (look for '--devnodes' and '--netdev_add' in vzctl man page). If you want to use some special stuff like, say, iptables module, from within a VPS — such module needs to be "virtualized" first (many iptables modules are already virtualized, so you can actually use them from a VPS).

By the way, speaking of that, recently Jason Stubbs, a Gentoo developer, send us a patch to virtualize ipt_REDIRECT kernel module. His work will appear soon in the kernel and vzctl we will release next week. Nice job, Jason!

LinuxPlanet article about OpenVZ

Check out the article entitled, "OpenVZ Delivers Easy Virtualization", written by Brian Proffitt. Obligatory quote:
The ease of use and speed of OpenVZ should help potential users figure out what they can use virtualization for. The historical uses include server consolidation and development/testing, but the OpenVZ virtual machines are so simple to set up, various security, training, and hosting implementations come very quickly to mind as well. During the demonstration, it was not hard to imagine a scenario where a virtual machine could be set up with a deliberately open (and "broken") service that would act as an attractive honeypot to crackers.
Or if you prefer, the Print version of the article.
Enjoy!

virtuozzo blog

virtuozzo blog has started yesterday; welcome to the club! :)

By the way, openvz blog is a community so you can post here as well if you'd like to — just make sure you have livejournal account, join the community and start posting.

xen

Pete Zaitcev (zaitcev), a kernel dev from Red Hat, writes about Xen here and here.

That's interesting that Xen patch is much bigger than OpenVZ patch, and very intrusive (this is unavoidable as I understand; OpenVZ is intrusive as well, especially the resource management part). And they still have a long way to go to become more of a product rather than interesting (and much hyped about) developing technology.

Still, the one goal that OpenVZ, Xen and all the other virtualization software projects and products have in common is to teach people virtualization — what is it, what kinds of virtualization do we have, in what scenarios and how it can be useful etc. etc. On that ground, I wish Xen project good luck.

Linux Virtualization presentation

The slides from my Linux Virtualization presentation at SCALE4x are now available from SCALE website: PDF | ODP.

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