OpenVZ vs. Xen

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jack_indigo
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OpenVZ vs. Xen

Post by jack_indigo »

Had the occasion today to use OpenVZ versus Xen virtual private server solution for a client on a web hosting provider. To my complete shock I found that OpenVZ will only give you burstable RAM, and when you hit that cap, you're stuck and system processes start to fail. Sure, it's faster than Xen, but that cap is brutal.

Xen, however, hits that RAM cap, does not offer burstable RAM, but does give you the ability to page to disk with a swap file. There's a slight performance penalty with that, but it seemed like a fair tradeoff.

So, overall, I recommend Xen VPS instead of OpenVZ VPS for most practical purposes.
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