Container-Based OS Virtualization

Conclusion

When first doing our research on container-based OS virtualization, we more or less expected the proclaimed feature lists to be on the exaggerated side. Surely, a technology as powerful as this would not have slipped under the media's radar. We figured one of the big players in the market had already bought some smaller company working on it, and then rebranded it to fit into their big "virtualization suites".

However, the deeper we delve into "virtualization" the more it becomes apparent that virtualization can be just as impressive a feature, rather than an all-encompassing solution. The philosophy behind OpenVZ seems to be based on this idea of using virtualization as a lightweight tool to improve a system, rather than using it to shield the system from the hardware and other virtual machines.

Containers shouldn't be competing with full-fledged hypervisors for the same market, as the many comparisons between Xen and OpenVZ often seem to suggest. Though they provide some of the same functionality, there is more than enough space to let both systems complement each other, as neither provides a solution to all problems.

Nonetheless, we found containers to be an incredibly solid solution, and despite the fact that we've spent most of our time with it on the supposedly less user-friendly open source version, working with it has been really straightforward and fairly simple.

What we believe the technology might actually need the most now is a solid marketing strategy, and we're looking at Parallels to take that leap. The recent changes that company has undergone do point in a good direction, but Virtuozzo could use some more functionality to support its presence in high availability solutions, and most importantly, the virtualized datacenter. Perhaps some live migration for Windows containers, Parallels?

Sources

The OpenVZ wiki

Resource Management: Beancounters