OpenVZ Project Creates Templates for Debian Virtual Servers

Published: January 17, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While the Xen open source virtual machine partitioning project gets a lot of headlines, there is another approach to virtualization that was developed independently by Sun Microsystems and SWsoft that creates what look like full virtual machine partitions as far as applications and users are concerned, but which have a single operating system kernel and a single file system. Sun calls these kinds of partitions "containers" on its Solaris Unix, and SWsoft calls them "Virtual Private Servers" when running on its Virtuozzo virtualization software for Linux and Windows.

In December, SWsoft took the core hypervisor piece of its Virtuozzo product open source and created a project site for it called OpenVZ. The commercial Virtuozzo product includes the automation and management features that make OpenVZ a commercial-grade product; it costs money, of course, just like the tools to make the Xen hypervisor useful and support for that product will also cost money. Virtuozzo also runs on Linux and Windows, while OpenVZ only runs on Linux.

Last week, the OpenVZ project announced that it has released pre-built templates for Virtual Private Servers for the Debian 3.1 "Sarge" release of that Linux variant. The templates have been built for 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X64 processors running Sarge, and you can get them by clicking here. The OpenVZ project has created VPS templates for CentOS Linux and Red Hat's Fedora Core 4.