OpenVZ User Community Enthusiastic About Operating System Virtualization Project

HERNDON, Va., May 21, 2006 – The OpenVZ worldwide user community reports positive feedback on the operating system virtualization project, including those who prefer OpenVZ (http://openvz.org) over their experience with other open source virtualization initiatives.

Rick Blundell in Florida currently has 20 OpenVZ virtual servers running and says, “My experience with OpenVZ has been excellent.” He is an active member of the OpenVZ user community who has helped others based on his experience, while at other times received helpful advice. “I find OpenVZ much easier to use in comparison to Xen.”

John Kelly in South Carolina says, “I need to conserve my resources as much as possible so for my needs, OpenVZ is better than Xen. The one-kernel approach conserves memory, leaving more for applications. And having all virtual servers in one disk partition saves disk space, too.” Kelly added, “The ease of quickly installing new operating environments with the template management function is a surprise bonus.”

Werner Fischer in Austria has done development work with OpenVZ and high availability clustering, which he says, “makes it possible to start a virtual machine in seconds after a failover” within the information technology infrastructure. Werner Fischer is a developer at
Thomas-Krenn.AG. He recently presented a paper on the subject at the Linux Tag conference in Germany (on May 6).

Martin Dobrev in Bulgaria uses OpenVZ on a production server and says, “The existing configuration files and startup scripts for different Linux distributions are making my life easy.” He continues to use Linux-VServer virtualization software, which he expects to convert to OpenVZ. “OpenVZ software is innovative and easy-to-use virtualization technology,” he said. “I find it's easy to set up a running virtual server in a short time.”

Justin Bridges in Georgia echoed those comments praising OpenVZ, which he said “is very easy to set up” and further commented “OpenVZ rocks.” He is a self-described “big fan” and reports he has never encountered a problem with the open source OpenVZ virtualization software. He set up dedicated virtual servers for playing online games and built a control panel for users that tracks their game scoring.

“It’s gratifying to see the diversity in the ways that OpenVZ is being used, and consistency in the user benefits of performance and simple administration of virtual servers,” said Kir Kolyshkin, manager of the OpenVZ project. “Our goal, of course, is to gain adoption as part of the mainstream and other Linux distributions. We continue to build a vibrant, involved user community in the OpenVZ collaborative open source virtualization project.”


About the OpenVZ Project

The OpenVZ project freely distributes and offers support to its users, promoting operating system virtualization through a collaborative, community effort. Since going into full production late last year, the OpenVZ has been very active with the user community with more than 3,000 message posts on its support Forum. The OpenVZ website attracted more than one million hits for the month of April as more businesses and individuals explore and contribute to the leading open source operating system virtualization project.

OpenVZ software comes with user tools that help automate management of virtual servers. OpenVZ creates isolated, secure virtual environments on a single physical server – enabling greater server utilization and superior availability with fewer performance penalties. The virtual servers perform and execute like independent servers with their own memory, configuration files, users and applications. Each can be re-booted independently.

With the power of modern CPUs from both Intel and AMD (including the latest dual-core offerings), hardware is often under utilized. With virtualization technology, the server can effectively be split into many small ones, each running its tasks so that the whole server is utilized more efficiently.

OpenVZ software serves the needs of the community developers, testers, documentation experts, and other technology enthusiasts who wish to participate in and accelerate the technology development process. OpenVZ, supported by SWsoft, is open source software that is used as the basis for the Virtuozzo virtualization software product. Also, the OpenVZ project maintains a blog site discussing virtualization technology, which can be accessed here, http://blog.openvz.org.