Interview with OpenVZ Project Manager Kir Kolyshkin (MontanaLinux.org) [LWN.net]

Interview with OpenVZ Project Manager Kir Kolyshkin (MontanaLinux.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2007 9:54 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Interview with OpenVZ Project Manager Kir Kolyshkin (MontanaLinux.org) by nim-nim
Parent article: Interview with OpenVZ Project Manager Kir Kolyshkin (MontanaLinux.org)

yep yep.

It's more useful in mixed environments, especially when dealing with legacy applications, which is very normal problems administrators face everyday.

Say you have some application that only runs on Windows NT or Windows 2000. (there are a few). Then a VM will be able to handle that nicely. Or say your a Windows/Linux shop that is acquiring some smaller company that had it's custom accounting software based around SCO's Unix stuff.

Say your a smaller place that wants to migrate to Linux for the desktop, but you need to keep a Exchange or a MSSQL server going... or maybe you have a few Windows apps, but you don't mind setting it up so that they can be accessed over 'remote desktop' (for example were I work we have the fedex shipping software to deal with). Vmware is perfect for dealing with those situations.

Now.. If you have a shitload of web servers or something like that then stuff like OpenVZ is perfect.

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Interview with OpenVZ Project Manager Kir Kolyshkin (MontanaLinux.org)

Posted Aug 28, 2007 16:14 UTC (Tue) by kolyshkin (subscriber, #34342) [Link]

Containers can be useful in that situation as well. It's just you have Linux containers on Linux boxen (be it OpenVZ, Linux-VServer or FreeVPS), Windows containers on Windows boxen (say, Virtuozzo for Windows), Solaris containers on Solaris boxen, AIX containers (called WPARs) on AIX and so on.

Surely with VMware you can have all that on a single box. To find out what is better, you have to solve the equation which involves variables such as how many VMs/VEs do you want to have, how many physical servers do you want to use, what is the acceptable performance level etc.

Interview with OpenVZ Project Manager Kir Kolyshkin (MontanaLinux.org)

Posted Aug 30, 2007 9:29 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I've happily used Linux-Vserver on Xen and Xen/Qemu/KVM-based VMs. :)

Comparing VMware/Xen/Qemu+Kqemu/KVM vs OpenVZ/Linux-vserver/Solaris containers are a bit of a canard. I don't like it when people do it, and the biggest violator I've seen was Sun promoting Solaris and trying to tell people that their containers was just soooo much better then Xen or whatever.

It's a bit like trying to compare Emacs or Vim against Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org. Sure, sure both can be used to edit text, but I have yet to see a extension for Vim or Emacs that will incorporate a ODBC connector to a SQL database so office folks can build quick-n-dirty data entry forms or build graphs from importing data into a spreadsheet!

Text editor vs. Word processor analogy

Posted Aug 30, 2007 23:21 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

My question for you is... which is more efficient and better suited for editing text, a text editor or a word processor? You asked which is better suited for word processing, a text editor or a word processor? Kind of a silly question.

If you need to run multiple versions of the Linux kernel... or if you need to run OSes other than Linux... then you need machine virtualization. If you want to do Linux on Linux... OS virtualization is so much more scalable and provides much greater density than machine virtualization.

My point is that both excel in the areas they serve.