Difference between OpenVZ and LXC

OpenVZ

OpenVZ is a Linux container solution. It was first released in 2005 by SWSoft, now known as Parallels. Though connected to a private, proprietary company, OpenVZ is open source and available for free.

The previously mentioned container projects have been related to BSD. One fundamental difference between BSD and Linux is that Linux is technically just a kernel. All of the tools that make Linux functional are supplemental and from different projects. For example, the chroot command in Ubuntu Linux comes from the GNU coreutils project.

This distinction between BSD and Linux is quite important in the case of OpenVZ. Because containers require kernel level access, the container code needs to be integrated into the kernel. OpenVZ only released its code as a set of patches and custom-compiled Linux kernels they initially never bothered to get their code into the official Linux kernel.

As explained in a recent OpenVZ blog entry, this was a mistake recognized way back in 2005, and the OpenVZ team has been working to get their code integrated into the main Linux kernel since then. This can sometimes be a very slow and painful process. The Xen project went through the same scenario.

OpenVZ has never really gained widespread acceptance in the Linux community. This is unfortunate since it is a very robust project with a large amount of features.


LXC

Finally, there is LXC. Well, before we get into LXC, let us talk about Linux Namespaces. A namespace is another term for segregation. Items in different namespaces are unable to collide or conflict with each other. Chroot can be thought of as a simple filesystem namespace.

As we have seen with all the other container projects, they implement features beyond filesystem segregation: users, processes, and the network are all also segregated.

Starting in 2001, the Linux kernel began supporting a series of namespaces. The first was mount namespaces, which can be thought of as an enhanced filesystem namespace. Since then, Linux has added support for UTS, IPC, PID, user, and network namespaces. This article goes into great detail about each of them.

Next, a quick mention about control groups otherwise known as cgroups. Cgroups limit the amount of resources a certain process can use. For example, a process could be limited to use just 50% of the total CPU on the server.

Between namespaces and cgroups, the Linux kernel has everything it needs to support a modern container system. And that is exactly what LXC is a collection of utilities that interact with namespaces and cgroups.

So, since LXC uses features native to the Linux kernel, this should make it a better choice over OpenVZ, right? I guess that depends on one's opinion of those features.

The Linux namespace and cgroup code is still in development. For example, user namespaces were only finalized a few months ago. Shortly after, they were found to be heavily exploitable.

Security in general is a very subjective and relational topic: what one person is paranoid of can be of no matter to another person. Security has always been a hot topic with LXC. Here are several different articles on the subject.

This part of the series summarized various existing container solutions. You might have noticed the added detail for the Linux-based solutions especially LXC.

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