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On my list of things to do: compare docker to zerovm to libvirt to ??? and figure out which one works will work best with rdma (infiniband) networks. Combined with nixos (maybe), this could work wonders for hpc data provenance.

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What about OpenVZ? It isn't as light as Docker (you get a whole OS) and solves a different problem, but it is solid at providing a OS virtualized container.

OpenVZ is almost identical to LXC, which is what Docker uses under the hood. You could port Docker to OpenVZ very easily. In fact, there is a plugin planned to do exactly that.

Fun fact: before running on lxc, dotCloud (where Docker originated from) was initially based on OpenVZ (which was great). As the mainline kernel's support for containers improved (in large part, I believe, thanks to the pioneering work of OpenVZ), eventually we moved over to that.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm working on a similar type of product, but involving heavy compute and data analysis. Since we aren't hosting web apps, we don't have the web routing complexity that you have, but we do share a lot of the backend pieces (OpenVZ and unionFS in our case).

Do you care to elaborate why you switched from OpenVZ to LXC?

Docker could be customized to run on ZeroVM :)

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