Virtualisation in the Linux kernel
Published: 20 Jan 2006 11:50 GMT
A push is under way to endow Linux with a virtual partitioning technology used by rival operating systems to make servers more efficient.
SWsoft is trying to get OpenVZ made part of the mainstream Linux kernel — the software at the heart of the operating system — and a part of the major commercial Linux versions, says Kirill Korotaev, a project manager at the company.
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 Fedora.
The companies' move to make OpenVZ partitioning standard in Linux is timely, says Pund-IT analyst Charles King.
"I believe virtualisation is a current or coming fact of life for every information technology vendor," King says. "Vendors who figure out how to easily integrate virtualisation features into their solutions will have a leg-up on competitors."
Over the years, new ways to carve a single server into separate sections have been introduced. Such divisions make it easier to run multiple independent tasks on a machine, keeping it gainfully employed instead of letting it idle through operational lulls. That increase in efficiency means collections of underutilised servers can be replaced with a smaller number of machines, lowering administration and operation costs.
Many of the several ways to subdivide a server rely on virtualisation, which breaks the hard link between software and the lower-level software or hardware on which it runs. The software's real foundation is replaced with a virtual one, but the operating system or higher-level software thinks it's running on the real thing.
Using its own take on virtualisation, OpenVZ divides a single copy of Linux so it appears to be several independent instances of the operating system, from the perspective of higher-level software. Separate domains, called virtual private servers, can be independently rebooted — though in reality, the underlying operating system stays up and running.
OpenVZ's approach isn't new; the same process has been used elsewhere. For example, Sun' Solaris was given a similar feature, called containers, when version 10 was launched a year ago. Before that, developers added a related technology, called "jails", to the FreeBSD version of Unix. IBM's Serge Hallyn has been working on jails for Linux, a variation of BSD's jails.
And OpenVZ isn't even the first major virtual private server software project for Linux. That position goes to Vserver, an open source package that's used in Positive Software's FreeVPS product.
But OpenVZ has the advantage over Vserver, says Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. "OpenVZ is an offshoot of a well-regarded commercial product that's used by quite a few large hosting providers, so it's clearly the more mature," he says. OpenVZ is an open source underpinning to Virtuozzo, sold by SWsoft, the main backer of the Linux push.
One complicating factor to the acceptance of the OpenVZ virtual private server is another technology, virtual machine software. Recently, servers using x86 processors gained new partitioning options through virtualisation. First came VMware's virtual machine software, which uses a hypervisor to let multiple independent operating systems run on the same computer.
Now an open source alternative to VMware is arriving, Xen, whose hypervisor is developed by start-up XenSource with support by...
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