Parallels

Kir posted the following this evening on the OpenVZ blog:

Looking forward to 2015, we have very exciting news to share on the future on OpenVZ. But first, let's take a quick look into OpenVZ history.

Linux Containers is an ancient technology, going back to last century. Indeed it was 1999 when our engineers started adding bits and pieces of containers technology to Linux kernel 2.2. Well, not exactly "containers", but rather "virtual environments" at that time -- as it often happens with new technologies, the terminology was different (the term "container" was coined by Sun only five years later, in 2004).

Anyway, in 2000 we ported our experimental code to kernel 2.4.0test1, and in January 2002 we already had Virtuozzo 2.0 version released. From there it went on and on, with more releases, newer kernels, improved feature set (like adding live migration capability) and so on.

It was 2005 when we finally realized we made a mistake of not employing the open source development model for the whole project from the very beginning. This is when OpenVZ was born as a separate entity, to complement commercial Virtuozzo (which was later renamed to Parallels Cloud Server, or PCS for short).

Now it's time to admit -- over the course of years OpenVZ became just a little bit too separate, essentially becoming a fork (perhaps even a stepchild) of Parallels Cloud Server. While the kernel is the same between two of them, userspace tools (notably vzctl) differ. This results in slight incompatiblities between the configuration files, command line options etc. More to say, userspace development efforts need to be doubled.

Better late than never; we are going to fix it now! We are going to merge OpenVZ and Parallels Cloud Server into a single common open source code base. The obvious benefit for OpenVZ users is, of course, more features and better tested code. There will be other much anticipated changes, rolled out in a few stages.

As a first step, we will open the git repository of RHEL7-based Virtuozzo kernel early next year (2015, that is). This has become possible as we changed the internal development process to be more git-friendly (before that we relied on lists of patches a la quilt but with home grown set of scripts). We have worked on this kernel for quite some time already, initially porting our patchset to kernel 3.6, then rebasing it to RHEL7 beta, then final RHEL7. While it is still in development, we will publish it so anyone can follow the development process.

Our kernel development mailing list will also be made public. The big advantage of this change for those who want to participate in the development process is that you'll see our proposed changes discussed on this mailing list before the maintainer adds them to the repository, not just months later when the the code is published and we'll consider any patch sent to the mailing list. This should allow the community to become full participants in development rather than mere bystanders as they were previously.

Bug tracking systems have also diverged over time. Internally, we use JIRA (this is where all those PCLIN-xxxx and PSBM-xxxx codes come from), while OpenVZ relies on Bugzilla. For the new unified product, we are going to open up JIRA which we find to me more usable than Bugzilla. Similar to what Red Hat and other major Linux vendors do, we will limit access to security-sensitive issues in order to not compromise our user base.

Last but not least, the name. We had a lot of discussions about naming, had a few good candidates, and finally unanimously agreed on this one:

Virtuozzo Core

Please stay tuned for more news (including more formal press release from Parallels). Feel free to ask any questions as we don't even have a FAQ yet.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Since Russia has 10 days of holidays in January, I really don't expect anything to be released until late January or more likely in February. One major change in the upcoming RHEL7-based Virtuozzo Core release is the move from the internal chkpoint code to CRIU. Although there are a lot more details and specifics to come, overall I see this as a very possitive move.

Kir Kolyshkin from the OpenVZ Project talks about Linux Containers:

Did you hear? A while back SWsoft decided to change its name to that of its partner company, Parallels. Parallels makes a commercial product very similar to VMware Server... but it seems to be most popular on the Mac. With SWsoft's Virtuozzo and their sponsoring of the OpenVZ project, is it any wonder that there would be a hybrid product that tries to compete with VMware ESX?

I haven't had a chance to watch the full video yet, and although it is mostly of a commercial nature, it advances discussion about Virtualization so I'm sharing it. They had it as a Windows Media file on their site and I've converted it to Flash so Linux users will have an easier viewing time.