I've used RHEL, CentOS and Fedora for many years... and as many of you already know... back in January, CentOS became a sponsored project of Red Hat. For the upcoming CentOS 7 release they are going beyond just the normal release that is an as-perfect-as-possible clone of RHEL. They have this concept of variants... where Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are formed around making special purpose builds of CentOS... spins or remixs if you will. I don't know a lot about it yet but I think I have the basic concept correct.

Looking at the numbers on stats.openvz.org I see:

Top host distros
-------------------
CentOS 56,725
Scientific 2,471
RHEL 869
Debian 576
Fedora 111
Ubuntu 82
Gentoo 54
openSUS 18
ALT Linux 10
Sabayon 6

and

Top 10 CT distros
-------------------
centos 245,468
debian 106,350
ubuntu 83,197
OR 8,354
gentoo 7,017
pagoda 4,024
scientific 3,604
fedora 3,173
seedunlimited 1,965

Although reporting is optional, the popularity of CentOS as both an OpenVZ host and an OpenVZ container surely has to do with the fact that the two stable branches of the OpenVZ kernel are derived from RHEL kernels.

Wouldn't be nice if there were a CentOS variant that has the OpenVZ kernel and utils pre-installed? I think so.

While I have made CentOS remixes in the past just for my own personal use... I have not had any official engagement with the CentOS community. I was curious if there were some OpenVZ users out there who are already affiliated with the CentOS Project and who might want to get together in an effort to start a SIG and ultimately an OpenVZ CentOS 7 variant. Anyone? I guess if not, I could make a personal goal of building a CentOS and/or Scientific Linux 6-based remix that includes OpenVZ... as well as working on it after RHEL7 and clones are released... and after such time the OpenVZ Project has released a stable branch based on the RHEL7 kernel.

I will acknowledge up front that some of the top CentOS devs / contributors have historically been fairly nasty to OpenVZ users on the #centos IRC channel. They generally did not want to help someone using a CentOS system running under an OpenVZ kernel... but then again... their reputation is for being obnoxious to many groups of people. :) I don't think we should let that stop us.

Comments, feedback, questions?

We have just released a new RHEL6-based kernel, 042test005. It is shaping up pretty good — as you can see from the changelog, it's not just bug fixes but also performance improvements. If you haven't tried it yet, I suggest to do it today! Do not postpone this until 2011 — after all, this is what will become the next stable OpenVZ kernel.

RHEL6 kernel needs an appropriate (i.e. recent) Linux distribution. If you don't want latest Fedora releases, can't afford RHEL6, and tired of waiting for CentOS 6, I suggest you go with Scientific Linux 6 (SL6). This is yet another RHEL6 clone developed and used by CERN, Fermilabs and other similar institutions.

While SL6 is still at its infancy (they have recently released alpha 3 and plan to release beta 1 at Jan 7 2011), it it worth trying since it's based on a very stable set of sources from RHEL6. Repositories and stuff are available from http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/