Debian Project Weaves OpenVZ Virtualization into Its Distro

Published: August 8, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The OpenVZ, the open source spinout created by SWsoft to foster a development community for its Virtuozzo virtualization software for Linux, announced last week that the Debian project that governs the Linux distribution of that same name has begun the process of incorporating OpenVZ into the development releases of Debian.

According to Kir Kolyshkin, the manager of the OpenVZ project who is paid by SWsoft and given great freedom to push the technology into new areas, OpenVZ has in fact been in the Debian tree called "Sid," which is the unstable, development release of Debian. The next stable release of Debian is due around the end of the year, and the current stable release is known as "Sarge." Because OpenVZ is not in control of Debian, Kolyshkin cannot say when OpenVZ partitions will be officially supported in Debian as a host for virtual machines. There are a number of people who are considering back-porting features from Sid onto Sarge, and this could happen with OpenVZ features. (Similarly, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 was a backport of Linux 2.6 features inside the Linux 2.5 development release onto a Linux 2.4 kernel, you will remember.)

On the host side, OpenVZ runs on RPM-based Linuxes, such as Red Hat's Fedora Core and RHEL 3 and 4 and Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and, presumably, the new SLES 10. Gentoo, itself a variant of Debian, has had support for OpenVZ for a while, and Kolyshkin says that support for Mandriva distributions is coming in a few months. On the guest side, Kolyshkin says that "basically you can install anything you want," and in fact, as I reported back in January, OpenVZ has already created templates for supporting Debian Linux as a guest on top of the OpenVZ hypervisor and inside what SWsoft calls virtual private server, or VPS, partitions. Fedora Core 3, 4, and 5, as well as openSUSE 10, SUSE 9, CentOS 4, Debian 3.1 (Sarge), Slackware 10, and Ubuntu 6 are all supported as guests inside OpenVZ partitions.