CentOS virt - Jan 2021 - OS-level virtualization using LXC and systemd-nspawn containers

Hello All,

OpenVZ 6 in the past was a very popular technology
for creating OS-level virtualization containers.

But OpenVZ 6 is EOL now (because RHEL 6 / CentOS 6 is EOL)
and all OpenVZ 6 users should migrate to some alternatives.

I found only two possible free/open source alternatives for OpenVZ 6:

- LXC
- systemd-nspawn

Does anyone use LXC and/or systemd-nspawn
containers on RHEL 8 / CentOS 8 for production?

What are advantages and disadvantages of each of these technologies?

Can you share your experience with LXC and/or systemd-nspawn
for RHEL 8 / CentOS 8 operating system on the hardware node?

===========================================================
As I understand, LXC is not supported by Red Hat and it should be used 
on RHEL at its own risk?

But, as I understand from the articles

- https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1533893
- https://access.redhat.com/articles/2726611

systemd-nspawn is also not supported by Red Hat and should be used at 
its own risk?

So, between LXC and systemd-nspawn is there no difference despite 
what?systemd-nspawn is the part of the RHEL 8 operating system
and can be installed on the RHEL 8 from the BaseOS repo?

Are there any chances that the situation with support for systemd-nspawn
will change in the future and this OS-level virtualization technology
will become fully supported in the RHEL 8.x or the RHEL 9.x version?

-- 
Best regards,
  Gena

Greetings,

----- Original Message -----
> I found only two possible free/open source alternatives for OpenVZ 6:
> 
> - LXC
> - systemd-nspawn
Some you seem to have overlooked?!?

1) OpenVZ 7
2) LXD from Canonical that is part of Ubuntu
3) podman containers with systemd installed (set /sbin/init as the entry point)

I use LXC on Proxmox VE (which I guess should be #4 above) some although I
primarily use it for VMs.

Oh, LXD is supposedly packaged for other distros but given that they aren't
much into SELinux and they are into snaps, I'd not really recommend it
outside of Ubuntu.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]