I am currently standing at the OpenVZ booth at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, San Francisco. Today is the first day of the show, the traffic is pretty good. The only bad thing is Delta lost my bag with booth banners and rollups so the booth looks a bit empty.

Marc Perkel, Scott Dowdle and Adeel Nazir are all manning the booth, talking to existing and (I hope) future OpenVZ users. So I was able to release a new RHEL5-based kernel right from here.

Tomorrow morning at 10:15 I will be giving a talk titled "Containers, Virtualization, and Live Migration".

Recently, I had the opportunity to present at a session of the Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo in San Jose. It was a good fit because they had a special track on virtualization, and OpenVZ (and the Virtuozzo product) is the only stable virtualization technology available now for Itanium servers.

Once again, I was able to talk with Andrew Morton (a kernel hacker, the right hand of Linus Torvalds) and was encouraged about the prospect of OS virtualization and OpenVZ in the Linux kernel. That is something we would really like to see and have been working towards. This article summarizes Andrew’s remarks noting “OpenVZ already has thousands of systems out there” and “as far as containerization standard in mainline goes, ‘most of the stakeholders are playing together quite nicely’”.

Yes, we are and we’ll keep at it so we can realize our goal.

We have just returned back from Germany, where I was presenting OpenVZ at Linux World Cologne. For the first time, we had a separate dedicated booth, and we really enjoyed that.

For those three days, we have met hundreds of people, distributed about 100 of OpenVZ DVDs and booklets, and said about million of words telling and showing people what is OpenVZ, how it can be used, what are pros and cons and so on. Surprisingly, a lot of people found it's just what they need.

We also met a number of existing OpenVZ users — for example, one was using it in a small (25 permanent employees + 25 interns) commercial company, where they need a Samba server, a Collax server, and development server, all of three for some reason requiring three different Linux distributions to run on. So, instead of having three servers, they used OpenVZ to create three VEs. It is a production environment working flawlessly for a few months.

I have also met a student who did his thesis on comparing Xen and OpenVZ performance — the thesis is in German but we might translate a part of it later. If you guessed that OpenVZ outperforms Xen than you are damn right.

Finally, in a true spirit of open source, we helped a Debian OpenVZ user to fix a minor misconfiguration and he was finally able to run OpenVZ on his notebook. He is using OpenVZ as a replacement for UML.