To choose the best VPS hosting solution for their company, administrators usually look at hardware resources, compare prices and search for the best value for their money.
The virtualization technology that powers your server is one thing that few webmasters stop to think about when building their websites. Our objective today is to examine KVM and OpenVZ, two of the most popular virtualization solutions available on the market, to see how they will impact your hosting services in the future.
What is KVM?
As the name suggests, KVM is a kernel-based virtual machine and was introduced with the Linux kernel in 2007. There is nothing more exciting than turning a physical server into a hypervisor with this virtualization module. You can order KVM VPS, Linux VPS, and Windows VPS from here. By using KVM, virtual machines can be created that can run on different operating systems and be completely independent of the host and each other.
KVM is available in the Linux kernel and so being free doesn’t mean it lacks any valuable features. Among them are the following:
- CPU hotplug support
- Live server migration
- Dynamic memory management
- VM image support
- Nested guest support
What is OpenVZ?
OpenVZ can be traced to the late 1990s when it broke ground as a virtualization solution at the operating system level. There was a time when team member Alexander Tormasov and team member Sergey Belosov started building a system that would allow Linux users to create multiple “virtual environments” on the same physical machine.
Containers are versions of these machines that use the host’s kernel but are independent machines with their files, processes, IP addresses, libraries, etc., even though they use the host’s kernel.
Similar to KVM, OpenVZ is a free and open-source virtualization software with the following key features:
- Low overhead on hardware resources
- Relatively easy setup
- Efficient resource management
- Isolated traffic and firewalling for individual containers
- Health monitoring system
Hardware requirements for KVM vs OpenVZ
To run a hypervisor, your computer needs to have a significant amount of power, which means you can’t share system resources equally between guest machines.
OpenVZ’s OS-level virtualization eliminates the need for an entire hypervisor. You can run all containers by OpenVZ with little overhead on the host.
Based on estimates, it can be said that up to 99% of physical server hardware can be safely distributed across multiple containers.
Comparison of OpenVZ and KVM based on OS support
Thanks to the full virtualization that KVM offers, you can use any operating system for your virtual machine. Most of the hosting providers use Linux as their physical server OS. If the company uses KVM virtualization for its physical servers, creating a Windows or FreeBSD VPS should not be a problem.
All containers you build with OpenVZ are packaged as a Linux distribution, and this kernel runs all your containers. Consequently, to run containers on a platform other than Linux, there is no other option but to use Linux containers.
Memory distribution between KVM and OpenVZ
In terms of how OpenVZ and KVM distribute the host’s RAM, a major difference between the two solutions is in how they are implemented. OpenVZ does not limit the amount of memory per virtual machine, whereas KVM has a hard limit per virtual machine. Unused memory in OpenVZ is accessible to all containers running on the server.
In most cases, this won’t cause too much of a problem, especially if you don’t have a lot of containers on your server. However, there is a possibility that if the RAM usage of one of your VPS machines increases, it may adversely affect the performance of other accounts as well.
KVM vs OpenVZ – Price
As open-source solutions, both solutions are free to download and use without any restrictions. You can even download and enable them and install them on your Linux computer at home.
KVM is a more expensive option from a hosting provider’s perspective than other virtualization technologies, mainly due to its higher hardware requirements and more complex setup process.
Because OpenVZ has a lower overhead and a simpler configuration, it has become a favorite among companies looking for a budget-friendly solution due to its lower overhead.
Conclusion
They rarely advertise the choice of virtualization technology that hosting companies use. Most of the time, this is because users show relatively little interest in such technical matters. From the website owner’s perspective, this rarely affects the success of their project in any significant way.
As we have learned, virtualization solutions and their proper implementation are crucial to providing the highest quality hosting services.
