It was almost 10 years ago that I organized a kerneltrap.org interview with our at-that-time kernel team leader Andrey Savochkin, which was published on April 18, 2006. As years go by, kerneltrap.org is no more, Andrey moved on to got a PhD in Economics and is now an Assistant Professor, while OpenVZ is still here. Read on for this great piece of memorabilia.

Andrey Savochkin leads the development of the kernel portion of OpenVZ, an operating system-level server virtualization solution. In this interview, Andrey offers a thorough explanation of what virtualization is and how it works. He also discusses the differences between hardware-level and operating system-level virtualization, going on to compare OpenVZ to VServer, Xen and User Mode Linux.

Andrey is now working to get OpenVZ merged into the mainline Linux kernel explaining, "virtualization makes the next step in the direction of better utilization of hardware and better management, the step that is comparable with the step between single-user and multi-user systems." The complete OpenVZ patchset weighs in at around 70,000 lines, approximately 2MB, but has been broken into smaller logical pieces to aid in discussion and to help with merging.

Jeremy Andrews: Please share a little about yourself and your background...

Andrey Savochkin: I live in Moscow, Russia, and work for SWsoft. My two major interests in life are mathematics and computers, and I was unable to decide for a long time which one I preferred.

I studied in Moscow State University which has a quite strong mathematical school, and got M.Sc. degree in 1995 and Ph.D. degree in 1999. The final decision between mathematics and computers came at the time of my postgraduate study, and my Ph.D. thesis was completely in the computer science area, exploring some security aspects of operating systems and software intended to be used on computers with Internet access.

Jeremy Andrews: What is your involvement with the OpenVZ project?