OpenVZ Project Virtualizes Linux on Power

Published: October 17, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The open source OpenVZ server virtualization project said late last week that it has created a version of its virtual private server software that runs on Linux operating systems that in turn run on IBM's and Freescale Semiconductor's Power and PowerPC processors.

There are many ways to carve up a server into smaller bits that allow more workloads to be crammed onto the boxes than would be possible on an unvirtualized, physical server. SWsoft, the company behind the OpenVZ project, created a variant called Virtual Private Servers. With this virtualization approach, SWsoft puts virtual machines atop a common kernel and file system, and in the case of its commercial Virtuozzo product, that can be Windows or Linux machines. Each virtual private server on the Windows or Linux box--and the applications that run on it--thinks that it is the whole machine, but it is just a trick of software. (This approach is similar to Solaris containers from Sun Microsystems and jails in open source BSD Unixes.)

The OpenVZ project took the core bits of the Virtuozzo product open source just for Linux operating systems. Until now, OpenVZ was only available on 32-bit X86, 64-bit X64, and 64-bit Itanium iron, but with the announcement last week, OpenVZ can run on 64-bit Power and PowerPC processors. Kir Kolyshkin, who managers the OpenVZ project, said that the port was relatively easy because 95 percent of the code in OpenVZ is platform-independent.

Kolyshkin also recently posted an article in the OpenVZ blog explaining that some of the bits of OpenVZ have been submitted as part of the Linux 2.6.19 kernel that Linus Torvalds is reviewing right now. The pieces of code that have been accepted into Linux have to do with virtualizing interprocess communication (IPC) namespaces, ITS namespaces, and processor ID namespaces. (Read the blog if you want to know more about what these are.) The important thing is that these low-level kernel resources are visible to all virtual private servers on a Linux machine, and now only the right virtual server can see only its own resources and not those of its neighbors. Such virtualization is necessary to fully contain a virtual private server and ensure its security. Kolyshkin says that a lot more work has to go into the kernel to allow full OS-level virtualization in a mainstream Linux kernel, but that this is an important first step.

Commercial Linux distributor Mandriva has already woven OpenVZ into its latest Corporate Server 4.0 release, which just came out a month ago. The OpenVZ project has already created Debian Linux templates, and is also now supporting Red Hat's Fedora Core 5 development release.

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