OpenVZ or Xen

Hello,

I was wondering the opinion and story's of any FWS member who would recommend OpenVZ or Xen for a VPS.

Which is better, all I know is that Xen you can have a swap were with OpenVZ you can't, but how are other things?

Thanks for the replies.

The real difference in Xen is that you are actually setting aside the resources per user. With OpenVZ - those resources are shared throughout the box and depending on how their hard limits are configured, in most cases one user could dominate the server. With Xen, you have your limits and they belong to you. Xen -- typically cannot be oversold in comparison to OpenVZ.

The real difference in Xen is that you are actually setting aside the resources per user. With OpenVZ - those resources are shared throughout the box and depending on how their hard limits are configured, in most cases one user could dominate the server. With Xen, you have your limits and they belong to you. Xen -- typically cannot be oversold in comparison to OpenVZ.
Didn't know about that, thanks for info.

You'll find more oversellers use OpenVZ and companies with lots of resources at their disposals are going to use Xen for assigned resources.

Thanks, the VPS we had has been converted to Xen, it seems a lot faster for the moment too.

There is a bit more to it than that. This article links to a independent comparison of the two technologies. http://blog.openvz.org/14024.html

Excerpt:

Here is the bottom line summary: IPC and disk I/O performance is better (or much better) for OpenVZ than Xen, CPU-intensive tasks are about the same for both, networking is a bit better in OpenVZ. Conclusion: for homogeneous (i. e. Linux-only) environments, OpenVZ is way better -- as it was designed to be.

Your reading that on an OpenVZ blog....which technology do you think they are going to root for?

Suse/Novell/HP/SUN - All are starting to contribute heavily into Xen development. I think the support and the community behind Xen is going to push it into a more commercially accepted market. In my opinion, it is the way to go considering it is now part of RHEL 5 (And falls under RHEL Commercial support) / SUSE (Commercially supported) and coming to Solaris 11 (Will be available under Sun Enterprise support) as a replacement for zones.

Xen is the technology to jump into right now. We have always used OpenVZ so I am not downing the technology. I am just stating that in the future -- the future is running fast towards Xen. With that, means consumer acceptance.

Now that was all from a provider standpoint.

As a customer! I prefer OpenVZ due to the flexibility. :) But you have to go with the market.

Well, we got it converted to Xen. There was still problems with it, so we had to re-install CentOS and cPanel, the migration went fine but system packages weren't working with it.

I would also like to say ConfigServer Security & Firewall now works (http://www.configserver.com/cp/csf.html), which is one of the main reasons for upgrading.

For Xen, you need to reboot the vps for the disk quota to change. For OpenVZ it is done in real time.

That is another main reason I like to use OpenVZ, no downtime at all on upgrades.