OpenVZ Forum: Support » Kernel update and downtime?

Home » General » Support » Kernel update and downtime?

Show: Today's Messages :: Show Polls :: Message Navigator
E-mail to friend

Re: Kernel update and downtime? [message #39233 is a reply to message #39232]

Wed, 31 March 2010 13:27

kir
Messages: 1645
Registered: August 2005
Location: Moscow, Russia

Senior Member

You can live migrate the containers from a machine with the older kernel to a machine with the newer kernel, we maintain backward compatibility. In most cases you can also migrate from newer to older, but this is not guaranteed since sometimes (say few times a year) we change the dump file format and can not maintain forward compatibility. I haven't heard about a single case when this was an issue though.

So yes you can do kernel updates w/o stopping containers that way -- migrate all CTs to another box, update the kernel and migrate all CTs back. Another way is to use ksplice.

As for Xen vs OpenVZ, check out HP labs paper from 2007 comparing Xen and OpenVZ -- http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-59R1.html

Kir Kolyshkin