Container-based operating system virtualization: A scalable, highperformance alternative to hypervisors

Hypervisors, popularized by Xen and VMware, are quickly becoming commodity. They are appropriate for many us-age scenarios, but there are scenarios that require system virtualization with high degrees of both isolation and effi-ciency. Examples include HPC clusters, the Grid, hosting centers, and PlanetLab. We present an alternative to hy-pervisors that is better suited to such scenarios. The ap-proach is a synthesis of prior work on resource containers and security containers applied to general-purpose, time-shared operating systems. Examples of such container-based systems include Solaris 10, Virtuozzo for Linux, and Linux-VServer. As a representative instance of container-based systems, this paper describes the design and implementa-tion of Linux-VServer. In addition, it contrasts the archi-tecture of Linux-VServer with current generations of Xen, and shows how Linux-VServer provides comparable support for isolation and superior system efficiency