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Why don't providers use OpenVZ 7?
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Why don't providers use OpenVZ 7?

Most providers use OpenVZ 6, which uses the 2.6.x kernel. OpenVZ 7 was launched quite some time ago, but I'm yet to see a provider which offers OpenVZ 7 based VPSes. Why don't providers offer it?

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Comments

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    Ploop is an abomination to start. Handling of templates is a pain in the butt, you can't just feed it a tarball and call it good (at least not that I'm seeing from initial glances).

    It's just a messy product and I question if it'll keep getting development given they spent a lot of entry trying to find ways to get people to migrate to Virtuozzo. If you go around the OVZ wiki you find a lot of attempts for them to upsell you.

    That's fine, we all deserve to make a living, the problem is that Virtuozzo is hellishly expensive and while they have a fantastic end user panel, that only goes so far. Even many fully managed shops moved away from it, likely because of cost.

    Francisco

    Thanked by 2AIO lowendclient
  • bulbasaurbulbasaur Member
    edited July 2018

    Francisco said: It's just a messy product

    Could you elaborate on that or point me to some resources in that direction?

    Even many fully managed shops moved away from it

    Long term, what do you (or providers in general) intend to move to, since OVZ6 EOL is not too far away? Not to mention OVZ6 templates seem to be hackjobs with a mix of held-back old packages and newer ones?

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    stevewatson301 said: Long term, what do you (or providers in general) intend to move to, since OVZ6 EOL is not too far away?

    Personally, our company has focused more on KVM's at this point and by next year I'll likely bring up enough transfer gear to offer 1:1 migrations for people into KVM instances instead.

    LXC and such has a lot of shortcomings (because it isn't designed for multi tenant use) so it's not a great option. You can jimmy rig parts but many parts are still borked.

    Francisco

    Thanked by 1First-Root
  • First-RootFirst-Root Member, Host Rep

    Just as Francisco said, for most companies it makes more sense to focus on KVM instead of integrating a new product.

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider
    edited July 2018

    The only reason I would use OVZ7 if it's an easy upgrade path from OVZ6. Out of stock, redirect people to KVM and state the benefits. More secure, less worry about stability, more flexibility.

    As to why providers don't offer it, really just because most providers use SolusVM which only supports OVZ6, the ones who use Virtualizor (which supports OVZ7) probably started later and just stuck with KVM or it was too buggy to be used in production. The ones who spent money or developed their own panels probably built it around KVM for long term.

    The only reason I can see people wanting OVZ7 is to find some of the super cheap oversold deals that's like 6GB for $4/m with newer kernel.

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    I'm never going back to Virtuozzo, Parallels was an awful company to work with and no matter how much money I wanted to spend with them they wouldn't let me. I would have to lie to speak with a real person and that person was never allowed to sell me licenses so I had to jump ship quickly because I couldn't grow my company.

    As for OpenVZ 7, I'm not sold on it yet which is a shame because my clients prefer OpenVZ over KVM. Originally I thought it was price, but clients will pay more for OpenVZ than they will KVM for some reason.

    Thanked by 1coreflux
  • JarryJarry Member

    @FR_Michael said:
    Just as Francisco said, for most companies it makes more sense to focus on KVM instead of integrating a new product.

    Correct me if I am wrong, but is not OpenVZ 7 using KVM/QEMU too? IIRC, it can run containers as well as VMs...

  • First-RootFirst-Root Member, Host Rep

    @Jarry said:

    @FR_Michael said:
    Just as Francisco said, for most companies it makes more sense to focus on KVM instead of integrating a new product.

    Correct me if I am wrong, but is not OpenVZ 7 using KVM/QEMU too? IIRC, it can run containers as well as VMs...

    That's true, as far as I know. But why should I use OpenVZ 7 instead of going directly with KVM/Qemu?

  • time4vpstime4vps Member, Host Rep

    We are currently testing OpenVZ 7 and will be migrating to it if no major incident happens in very near future.

    stevewatson301 said: Why don't providers offer it?

    I think major reason why providers adapts to new things slowly is the pain of migration. And once you've started offering OpenVZ 6 you try to avoid migration till the end :D

  • AlexanderMAlexanderM Member, Top Host, Host Rep

    We run a few OpenVZ 7 nodes in some locations, we are planning on migrations one day.

  • JarryJarry Member

    @FR_Michael said:

    @Jarry said:

    @FR_Michael said:
    Just as Francisco said, for most companies it makes more sense to focus on KVM instead of integrating a new product.

    Correct me if I am wrong, but is not OpenVZ 7 using KVM/QEMU too? IIRC, it can run containers as well as VMs...

    That's true, as far as I know. But why should I use OpenVZ 7 instead of going directly with KVM/Qemu?

    Because OpenVZ 7 gives you the best of both worlds? That's why I'm using Proxmox...

  • AnthonySmithAnthonySmith Member, Patron Provider

    Well, aside from those using custom panels vz7 on el7 was only really considered in a stable state 5 weeks ago.

    Personally I think containers will always have a place, also the migration process from VZ6>VZ7 is not trivial so I expect the popular panels will follow through soon and we will see a new surge of VZ7 offers, I think honestly the biggest problem has been on the communication side of things which made a lot of people look at alternatives.

    Its well over a year until EOL on VZ6 though so plenty of time.

  • imokimok Member

    stevewatson301 said: but I'm yet to see a provider which offers OpenVZ 7 based VPSes

    SSDNodes

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited July 2018

    Francisco said: Ploop is an abomination

    Works fine until you use it in production for a year :D

  • Kind of off topic but is the reason XEN was abandoned bc you can't over-allocate resources? What's the real story from a hosting provider's view?

  • ChristianDSHChristianDSH Member, Host Rep

    We're already using OpenVZ 7 on some of our combahton ssd ovz nodes, running without issues until now.

  • AnthonySmithAnthonySmith Member, Patron Provider

    sidewinder said: Kind of off topic but is the reason XEN was abandoned bc you can't over-allocate resources? What's the real story from a hosting provider's view?

    It no longer out performed KVM and has a heavier admin requirement.

  • zkyezzkyez Member

    Xen is still ok in enterprise environments due to vendors pushing it heavily. Oracle does it through Oracle VM, Citrix through xenserver and others. But yeah, kvm is easier. Or VMWare if you have the $ for support and licenses.

  • ShazanShazan Member, Host Rep

    I like OpenVZ 6 because of simfs. If I am not wrong, OpenVZ 7 uses bindmounts in place of it and user second level quotas are not implemented (at the moment) with bindmounts.

  • Tr33nTr33n Member

    Francisco said: Handling of templates is a pain in the butt, you can't just feed it a tarball and call it good (at least not that I'm seeing from initial glances).

    I also found the new template system bad at first, but once i've dealt with it, i found it offers a lot of advantages (eg simple system updates, quick adding of new packages)

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    @sidewinder said:
    Kind of off topic but is the reason XEN was abandoned bc you can't over-allocate resources? What's the real story from a hosting provider's view?

    KVM was supported natively in modern Linux kernels before Xen, hence why it was adopted so quickly IMO.

    Thanked by 2MikeA AnthonySmith
  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    @KuJoe said:

    @sidewinder said:
    Kind of off topic but is the reason XEN was abandoned bc you can't over-allocate resources? What's the real story from a hosting provider's view?

    KVM was supported natively in modern Linux kernels before Xen, hence why it was adopted so quickly IMO.

    It also doesn't require a custom kernel to run :P

    Francisco

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    MikeA said: SolusVM which only supports OVZ6

    I think this is the main answer, tbh...

  • TheLinuxBugTheLinuxBug Member
    edited July 2018

    Francisco said: It also doesn't require a custom kernel to run :P

    Actually I believe in more recent iterations of Xen as long as you were not using the compressed bzImage and/or using a specific version of the loader that supported it, you could boot pretty much any standard kernel. Though the point about overhead can be true for sure. Also, if you plan to run Windows in newer versions of Xen they effectively package KVM qemu and you are using KVM anyways to run non-pv based systems. So really, unless you are going to sell a bunch of Linux PV systems you might as well just go with KVM from the start.

    Personally I like Xen and use it for my personal hypervisors, but this isn't something I have a bunch of customers on and I mostly use PV containers anyways so it works well for my use case. Xen isn't dead, but it just isn't as versatile as KVM, as a lot of people want to install their own system from scratch instead of deal with a template.

    my 2 cents.

    Cheers!

  • Tr33nTr33n Member
    edited July 2018

    @raindog308 said:

    MikeA said: SolusVM which only supports OVZ6

    I think this is the main answer, tbh...

    SolusVM does support OpenVZ 7 since 1.20.0 (mainline release) / 1.19.00 (stable release).

    It doesn't handle OpenVZ 7 templates well, so it requires some workarounds. But didn't faced other issues until now.

  • How are LXC unprivileged containers in the latest Proxmox releases? What are they safe for?

    Due to my paranoia I currently still sandbox everything in KVMs behind a 'private' bridge. (thin-LVM with discard=on on SSD mdraid1)

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider
    edited July 2018

    @Tr33n said:

    @raindog308 said:

    MikeA said: SolusVM which only supports OVZ6

    I think this is the main answer, tbh...

    SolusVM does support OpenVZ 7 since 1.20.0 (mainline release) / 1.19.00 (stable release).

    It doesn't handle OpenVZ 7 templates well, so it requires some workarounds. But didn't faced other issues until now.

    I recall a while back I asked them via a support ticket about their VZ7 implementation and was told not to use it because it wasn't stable. Until they make a public announcement officially supporting it, I wouldn't touch it for putting clients on it.

  • Virtualizor supports OpenVZ 6 to 7 migrations. However their template management is still a big change from the previous OpenVZ 6 version.

    OpenVZ 7 is a nice concept but still will take time for mass adoption as its not that well tested.

    And KVM has matured over the years in addition to cheaper hardware.

    Its easier to run KVM directly on Ubuntu or CentOS and provide services.
    Infact using the latest kernel from Ubuntu gives pretty good performance in KVM.

  • Tr33nTr33n Member
    edited July 2018

    @MikeA said:

    @Tr33n said:

    @raindog308 said:

    MikeA said: SolusVM which only supports OVZ6

    I think this is the main answer, tbh...

    SolusVM does support OpenVZ 7 since 1.20.0 (mainline release) / 1.19.00 (stable release).

    It doesn't handle OpenVZ 7 templates well, so it requires some workarounds. But didn't faced other issues until now.

    I recall a while back I asked them via a support ticket about their VZ7 implementation and was told not to use it because it wasn't stable. Until they make a public announcement officially supporting it, I wouldn't touch it for putting clients on it.

    Never heard that they do not recommend using it. Neither their support told me that nor i can find that informations at the SolusVM 1.20.0 released thread on LET. The changelog on the stable (!) branch clearly indicate that they support it:

    Added support for OpenVZ on Virtuozzo Linux 7

    But yeah, expect the unexpected from SolusVM.

  • flipperhostflipperhost Member, Patron Provider

    After all, ı wonder if there is anyone who has extensively tested and compared and listed the issues he has had with Openvz 7 over OpenVZ 6 ?

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