This week’s TechMail is Install OpenVZ on CentOS to create a virtual container which discusses using the OpenVZ virtualization software. I have to admit, I’ve become extremely fond of OpenVZ. I stumbled upon it as the open source version of Virtuozzo which is used by a lot of VPS providers and I completely understand why. All I really need or want (for the most part) is a glorified chroot or BSD jail and OpenVZ fills this really nicely, without the overhead of full hardware virtualization. It’s easy to use, easy to maintain and run, and for Linux-on-Linux virtualization I think it blows away everything else I’ve tried for remote servers (vmware server? no thanks!). The fact that it’s very light-weight and very configurable have given this thing a permanent place on my internal server. I just wish it more closely followed the upstream kernel releases, but other than that, I’m loving it.