OpenVZ Philosophy
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OpenVZ Applications
OpenVZ provides a comprehensive solution for Hosting Service Providers allowing them to:
Have hundreds of customers with their individual full-featured virtual private servers
(Virtual Private Servers) sharing a single physical server;
Provide each customer with a guaranteed Quality of Service;
Transparently move customers and their environments between servers, without any manual
reconfiguration.
If you administer a number of Linux dedicated servers within an enterprise, each of which runs
a specific service, you can use OpenVZ to consolidate all these servers onto a single computer
without losing a bit of valuable information and without compromising performance. Virtual
Private Servers behave just like an isolated stand-alone server:
Each VPS has its own processes, users, files and provides full root shell access;
Each VPS has its own IP addresses, port numbers, filtering and routing rules;
Each VPS can have its own configuration for the system and application software, as well
as its own versions of system libraries. It is possible to install or customize software
packages inside a VPS independently from other VPSs or the host system. Multiple
distributions of a package can be run on one and the same Linux box.
In fact, hundreds of servers may be grouped together in this way. Besides the evident
advantages of such consolidation (increased facility of administration and the like), there are
some you might not even have thought of, say, cutting down electricity bills by times!
OpenVZ proves invaluable for IT educational institutions that can now provide every student
with a personal Linux server, which can be monitored and managed remotely. Software
development companies may use virtual environments for testing purposes and the like.
Thus, OpenVZ can be efficiently applied in a wide range of areas: web hosting, enterprise
server consolidation, software development and testing, user training, and so on.
Distinctive Features of OpenVZ
The concept of OpenVZ Virtual Private Servers is distinct from the concept of traditional virtual
machines in the respect that Virtual Private Servers (VPSs) always run the same OS kernel as
the host system (Linux on Linux, Windows on Windows, etc.). This single-kernel
implementation technology allows to run Virtual Private Servers with a near-zero overhead.
Thus, OpenVZ VPSs offer an order of magnitude higher efficiency and manageability than
traditional virtualization technologies.