I am asked by many as to what virtualization platform is best suited for them. Well, what is the best choice? OpenVZ or KVM? I decided to give you as much information here, without driving you nuts. This way, you will be able to decide for yourself. You will also find out why KVM costs are just a little bit higher than OpenVZ:

 

OpenVZ is a Linux based virtualization which shares the same Linux kernel on the host machine and is shared by all VPS instances AKA “containers”. This kernel cannot be modified as it being shared by other VPS clients on the same host. OpenVZ will only allow Linux operating systems such as Centos, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu to name a few. It allows sharing of its resources such as RAM or HDD which is provisioned by the hosting provider. HDD resources not being used can be used by other VPS clients. RAM resources are shared when you go over your allocated RAM set by the hosting provider. This is also known as “burstable” RAM. As you can see, it is easy to oversell resources. But when demands catch up the host has a hard time delivering performance. Here at WebHosts R Us, we do not oversell our OpenVZ servers and always make sure that the host machine is providing peak performance.

 

KVM stands for “Kernel-based Virtual Machine”. This provides a more isolated environment and gives users their own kernel. All VPS server instances have their own kernel and is not shared. Besides only being allowed to run Linux operating systems, you can also run Windows®. It will allow you to do your own kernel mods as you wish. This would be considered a “true” virtualization platform as resources are not shared with other VPS clients. This means better performance from lower requirements on the hypervisor. 100% of the RAM and disk resources are dedicated to the VPS client when it is provisioned.

 

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