[CentOS-virt] Best virtualization setup for Centos 5.2

Thu Jan 22 13:37:57 UTC 2009
Scott Dowdle <dowdle at montanalinux.org>

Sergej,

----- "Sergej Kandyla" <sk.paix at gmail.com> wrote:
> I also looking for light weight virtualization solutions.
> OpenVZ seems very good, but only reason that stopped me is that openvz
> kernel is not officially supported by CentOS\RHEL.
> 
> What could you say about stability of OpenVZ ?
> 
> Afaik, OpenVZ kernel is based on RHEL/CentOS kernel, but what the
> difference between them?
> Is any RHEL stability patches also included in OpenVZ kernel ?

The OpenVZ Project currently has three stable kernel branches: 1) RHEL4 2.6.9 based, 2) RHEL5 2.6.18 based, and 3) vanilla 2.6.18.  They have a number of development branches that may or may not make it to stable including 2.6.24 (used by Ubuntu), 2.6.26 (in the upcoming Debian 5.0), and 2.6.27.

Whenever Red Hat releases a kernel update they try to upgrade OpenVZ but the porting effort and the QA testing efforts can take some time... and sometimes Red Hat will come out with another kernel update before OpenVZ has released the last one.  As a result, OpenVZ can at times lag behind the Red Hat kernel some.  Of course they try to give more weight to serious security problems and released a update to the vslice issue (a very serious security issue in a range of mainline kernels a while ago) about the same time the CentOS project did... if I remember correctly.

So far as stability goes, I haven't had any issues with their kernels so I have found them to be very stable.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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