Vzstats, which we introduced at the end of May, turns 4 months today. While it's still a baby, we can already say it is showing some great potential. Current stats are at about 13 000 servers running OpenVZ, with more than 200 000 containers. The amount of newly registered hosts is not going down, so I assume we'll have more than 20K active servers and at least 300K containers by the end of year.
Let's see what an average OpenVZ host looks like. It's an 8 core machine with 16 GB of RAM and 700 GB of disk space on /vz, used less than by 20%. This Joe is hosting only 8 containers, of which 4 are CentOS, 2 Debian, 1 Ubuntu and 1 is something else. Pretty average, eh?
What would be the ultimate OpenVZ host then? This one is a 64 cores monster with 1 TB of RAM and 50 TB of disk space, running about 1000 containers.
You can see much more stats like that at the project server site, http://stats.openvz.org/. The problem, though, is that not all stats can be represented in a meaningful way. For example, with vzstats 0.5.1 we introduced top-ps script, showing top 5 processes in every running container. The idea was to have something similar to Debian's popcon, but taking process names rather than package names into account. We have received lots of data but, frankly speaking, we don't really know how to process all this. I tried a number of various queries and came out with some stats like "60% of all containers run a web server", but all in all, this is not so useful (or interesting) for OpenVZ development. More to say, users raised a concern that such stuff should not be looked into at all. That sounds about right, so we have just released vzstats-0.5.2 with the top-ps script removed.
We would like to thank all users who are participating in vzstats. Please continue to do so, and if you have any concerns, please speak up -- we are listening.
For the last two weeks or so we've been working on vzstats -- a way to get some statistics about OpenVZ usage. The system consists of a server, deployed to http://stats.openvz.org/, and clients installed onto OpenVZ machines (hardware nodes). This is currently in beta testing, with 71 servers participating at the moment. If you want to participate, read http://openvz.org/vzstats and run yum install vzstats on your OpenVZ boxes.
So far we have some interesting results. We are not sure how representative they are -- probably they aren't, much more servers are needed to participate-- but nevertheless they are interested. Let's share a few preliminary findings.
First, it looks like almost no one is using 32-bits on the host system anymore. This is reasonable and expected. Indeed, who needs system limited to 4GB of RAM nowdays?
Second, many hosts stay on latest stable RHEL6-based OpenVZ kernel. This is pretty good and above our expectations.
Third, very few run ploop-based containers. We don't understand why. Maybe we should write more about features you get from ploop, such as instant snapshots and improved live migration.
I tried it and was able to migrate a CentOS 7 container... but the Fedora 22 one seems to be stuck in the "started" phase. It creates a /vz/private/{ctid} dir on the destination host (with the same…
The fall semester is just around the corner... so it is impossible for me to break away for a trip to Seattle. I hope one or more of you guys can blog so I can attend vicariously.
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