Running Virtuozzo inside a ESX Guest

[JosephAVincent]

We are in the process of creating a new lab on a small budget.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience running Virtuozzo inside an ESX guest?

We would like to run Windows 2000, Windows 2003 S, Windows 2003 E, Windows R2 x64 inside a single ESX server with 16GB of RAM. This single machine would be used to develop solutions around different products.

[Jae_Ellers]

No it doesn't. It isolates process from each others address space. It does not protect them from system crashes, which I'd say is the primary function of a hypervisor. If you panic the kernel you're done. Plus the process virtualization is lighter weight when compared with a hypervisor solution. Even given the fattest 16-way I doubt you'd get to a 1000 vms under ESX, but this has been done with process virtualization.

Kind of like saying qbasic is a compiler because it lets you write code.

[zaznet]

So thinking of it as a process virtualization, it would be of benefit to run it on a VM in ESX?

[JosephAVincent]

The thing is that process virtualization (OS virtualization) is inheritly more efficient with things like memory than HW virtualization. The risk (as explained above) is that each virtual os is dependant on the host kernel for certain services and therefore one VM could theoretically crash other VMs. We think ESX would introduce a further layer of separation while preserving some of the efficiency of OS virtualization.

[zaznet]

Yeah, but my thinking is that you are still losing efficiency in each virtualization step. You could gain some of the "best of borth worlds" perhaps by combining that, but what realization of benefit are you going to see?

If an ESX VM hangs (kernel panic) you still have the same effect. Perhaps the best advantage is isolating multiple Virtuozzo servers but can't you achieve that with multiple servers anyway?

[Jae_Ellers]

Taking you back to the beginning of this post, this is a focused problem, not a general solution. OP wants to run multiple copies of each of 5 OS images for test/dev, up to 40 total vms. He wants to do this on a single box for cost containment. With Virtuozzo you get to do this more efficiently than stacking up multiple full copies of the OS. If there are benefits to running Virtuozzo on hardware there are benefits on VMware. I pointed out you can test with CentOS & Redhat using openvz for free to determine these benefits. I'll bet there are gains to be made here.

[mreferre]

I tried to summarize my personal (own) view on the matter:

http://it20.info/blogs/main/archive/2007/03/27/5.aspx

This is a general vision ....... not specifically addressing the requirements for this very thread.

Massimo.

[krt463]

Hello Joseph, how did this turn out for you?