VMware, Xen, KVM, and other virtualization platforms are great for testing new applications, consolidating low-use servers, and spinning up new environments quickly. However, the capability comes at the cost of additional overhead, both in terms of management and physical capacity. If you are dedicating significant resources to a single application, it makes sense to forgo virtualization and revert back to bare metal. But, at times it makes sense to have a logical separation between application instances, the ability to have identical applications running simultaneously, but keeping them individualized for management. That’s easy to do in virtualization, just keep the separate instance in their own virtual machine, but harder to do on bare metal. I knew how to solve that problem with FreeBSD, but what about Linux? Enter OpenVZ.