interviews

Robert Nelson seems to have come out of nowhere with an update to vzpkg. Before we get started let me briefly review what vzpkg is.

An OS Template is what OpenVZ uses as install media so you may install a Linux distribution into a container... since you cannot use a traditional CD-ROM / DVD nor .iso disk image. An OS Template is a .tar.gz file that represents a somewhat stripped down version of an installed Linux distribution as you would find it installed on a disk filesystem. So, if you want to create a CentOS 5.2 i386 container, you need to find an CentOS 5.2 i386 OS Template.

There are a number of recipes on the OpenVZ wiki for building OS Templates for various Linux distributions but the general process takes several steps and is quite a bit of work. Any tool that can simplify the creation (and updating) of an OS Template is a welcome addition. OpenVZ comes with vzpkgcache (part of the vzpkg package) which is designed to facilitate OS Template creation for Red Hat based distributions.

I had the opportunity to be part of the OpenVZ booth at the recent LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco where I met the OpenVZ Project Manager, Kir Kolyshkin. He was kind enough to answer some questions for me via email.

About the OpenVZ Project

ML: Please tell me a little bit about yourself... education, hobbies, family... what jobs did have before SWsoft / the OpenVZ project?

Kir KolyshkinKir: I graduated in CS from Ukhta State Technical University, it's in the city where I was born and lived, somewhere 1500 km north from Moscow, the capital of Russia where I live now.

While in the university I had a chance to work and play with not only boring DOS/Windows, but also OS/2, HP-UX, SCO, Novell Netware, and some other operating systems, including Linux of course. My first Linux distro was some ancient version of Slackware, I only remember it came with kernel 1.0.9 and the CD also contained patches for up to 1.1.50. I immediately fell in love with Linux and free software model.

Before I became the project manager for OpenVZ, I worked at a few companies, including positions at Deutsche Bank and at the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom. As for SWsoft, I did a few projects there -- a search engine (ASPseek, now mostly in oblivion), a few projects for Virtuozzo (lead development of vzctl, then kernel testing, then template tools).