Which One to Choose: Xen or OpenVZ?
Saturday, March 6th, 2010Web hosting services are type of online services that allow companies and private customers to make their sites accesible to other Intenet users. A web hosting company offers space on a server that users can pay to rent for a monthly fee. As you probably guess, any company that wants to be present on-line simply must use this service.
However, different hosting plans are suitable for different kind of applications. For a personal web page a single page hosting is usually enough. But a larger company website that has dozens of pages will need a more sophisticated platform, especially if the website has many visitors.
Usually you can get personal web hosting either for free or a token fee, but you’ll have to pay a monthly fee for a more complex business website. Why is this? Well, the more complex sites often require database support as well as application platforms. Thanks to such services clients are able to create and install significant applications, e.g. website forums.
We’re going to introduce you to two most popular web hosting platforms: Xen and OpenVZ.
Which to choose?
Answering that will require some dwelling on the theme. Both platforms have forever changed the hosting industry by offering a viable alternative to dedicated servers, by creating systems where a single server can be devided into servreral virtual servers with reduced cost, full root access, choice of multiple operating systems, and full file compartmentalization for private servers.
Xen
Xen is a popular paravirtualization platform that has familiar hardware emulation. Paravirtualization operates by establishing an interface between the operating system and the system’s hardware, which then responds to requests from other operating systems that have access and can interact with a paravirtualization interface.
One of the many benefits of using Xen is that it lets system administrators modify the kernel modules and take advantage of unused swap space to meet memory demands.
Open VZ
OpenVz is a platform built on a Linux kernel, which has been altered to allow the operating system virtualization platform to support several Linux virtual private servers. Administrators are provided with full root access and power to carry out all commands normally found on a dedicated server.
What’s our recommendation?
As you might expect, each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. In case of Xen, it’s recommended for websites that need more memory. Additional memory is especially important for those who plan to do a lot of one-off tasks like encoding video, compiling applications or Java development. But those who would prefer to constantly use swap space instead of installing the appropriate amount of RAM, shouldn’t go for Xen. The reason is possible performance penalties in case of constant space swapping. Actually, Xen quite often overloads when swap space is used too often, which makes it useless.
Therefore, the majority of users prefer OpenVZ. It deals faster with average operations and additionally rarely overloads, which proves higher reliability. Private users in need of reliable service and more memory overhead will particularly benefit from this platform.
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