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Why do so many providers here use OpenVZ?
conradrock
Member
in General
I've noticed glancing through the discussions here and I notice that a lot of the cheaper providers are using OpenVZ? With all of limits OpenVZ puts you in between KVM or Xen, why go with this one? I'm just curious - I actually own provider infrastructure already, so I do know the many differences between the Hypervisors (for example, I provide OpenStack backed KVM instances along with OpenStack backed baremetal)
I'm just really intrigued why someone would want to run OpenVZ anymore... and I still see many people using it.
Thanks,
Conrad
Comments
LowEndPrice
The density of OpenVZ is unrivaled which allows the price to be lower which in turn attracts customers on mass.
Pretty simple really.
OpenStack running KVM or XCP-ng is free too, scales to the same density as OpenVZ at this point (especially XCP-ng), and offers more choices of OSes and better overall enduser experience.
Most compact answer
Besides not all customers require full virtualization
so they prefer OpenVz over KVM
I originally setup my network to provide instances for high bandwidth Tor exit nodes, which means some CPU and bandwidth intensive stuff. The fact that OpenVZ doesn't run BSDs was the automatic turnoff-no-go right there for me personally.
I do kind of understand the other points though. I was just namely curious.
No
Yes, especially with XenServer (XCP-ng). The only thing that they can't catch up to is the CPU side of things, but that's because of the differences in how they utilize CPU. I can still oversubscribe on vCPUs though.
No, you are just wrong.
Ok, if you say so. Again, with the memory/swap and vCPU overcommits, you can actually highly scale at pretty significant ratios.
what ratio in production?
You might keep in mind that Ant was one of the OG Xen providers here on LEB/T.
Why do so many providers here still use OpenVZ 6 instead of OpenVZ 7?
Because there is important stuff that works on 6 but not on 7.
Ok, I understand that. I’ve been working with it for several years as well, but XenServer/XCP starting in 7.x completely changed how it performs it’s vcpu and memory overcommiting, and improved it greatly in 8.0.
KVM is the same way, with the latest generation of it you have the ability to overcommit on certain circumstances at 150%.
Don’t get me wrong, I like containers, coming from the world of Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails, I just believe that the benefits of running OpenStack with LVM and XCP-ng (I’m running dual hypervisors in my environment for flexibility) from a product standpoint outweigh selling containerized VPS.
For example?
In short, OpenVZ does not have the OS overhead (resources used for running the complete OS), while KVM comes with OS overhead (you do get a full OS though)
I think the soul reason is indeed the low price and scalability. OpenVZ is slightly better for CPU intensive tasks as well but other than that I would prefer KVM over it any day of the week.
Id also like to say that OVZ in most cases on here is provided by SolusVM which has a WHMCS plugin that's free, This makes it easier for providers to oversell and not have to pay for a module to do so, Not saying all OVZ offers are bad because there are many what i would consider original providers on here that offer some amazing deals on OVZ.
As mentioned KVM and OVZ are completely different even for the overcommit, its not a full system its a container thus meaning less disk space, less resources used all together,
Consider this:
You may be able to put 20 KVM on a CPU, OVZ you could put in my testing double maybe even more on a CPU before it gets overrun...
I do agree with this - the low price and scalability.
Why we keep buying it.
Being at it, why are Linux Containers not taking off big time?
you will never reach the level of overselling that openVZ offer using xenserver/xcp-ng
we are pure xenserver shop (now part of our servers is xcp-ng) . I didnt try openVZ for years so talking about it from very old experiance
I can give you 2 main points why xenserver is not good fir for overselling
A. small VMs
1- you will never be able to run stable ultra low ram vps on xenserver (try running 128mb ram vps in xenserver and check the stability)
2- in xenserver each vm has the full OS stack which make it again very heavy for very small vms
B. overselling
1- in xenserver users can easily see you oversubscribe by checking the baloon driver and using this they can calculate exactly how much ram they are taking
2- for cpu they can see clearly steal time (not sure about openVZ if they hide this info)
the idea of point B is that you will be caught if you do it easily while in openVZ it is not that obvious