KVM vs OpenVZ in 2026 — is anyone still selling OVZ at all?

It's been a full year since Virtuozzo finally EOL'd the OpenVZ 7 kernel branch, and I'm genuinely curious if any provider is still offering it on new orders. The virtualization tax on KVM has dropped significantly with modern hardware: nested page tables, APICv, and posted interrupts mean you're looking at maybe 1-3% overhead for most workloads. Compare that to the old OVZ days where you were sharing a single kernel with whoever decided to run conntrack -c 0 inside their container.

The cgroup v1 to v2 migration killed the last practical argument for OVZ on new deployments. LXC/LXD took the container niche — https://linuxcontainers.org is where that lives now — KVM took the VPS niche, and here we are. Or am I missing some obscure provider still shipping OVZ8 beta on CentOS 7 kernels?

If you've seen OVZ in the wild recently, drop the provider name. I'm collecting data.

Back in 2009 my first "VPS" was an OpenVZ container on a node with 64GB RAM and dual Xeon L5420s. They don't make them like that anymore, and honestly maybe that's fine. The provider oversold that node so hard my beancount limits were basically fictional — I could burst to 8 cores for thirty seconds before the oom-killer came for my processes. It was magical and terrible.

I remember when OVZ6 shipped with vswap and everyone thought it would fix the memory accounting mess. Spoiler: it didn't. The nostalgia is warm but the reality was 3AM tickets because someone's MySQL container ate the node page cache.

Still, there was something charming about those $7/year boxes. You learned kernel internals whether you wanted to or not.

Back when I started in this business, virtualization meant VMware ESX on physical SANs and we charged by the gigabyte of provisioned storage. Kids these days complain about a five-dollar VPS being "oversold." You have no idea what overselling looked like in 2006.

OpenVZ was always a hack. A useful hack, certainly — it put low-end hosting on the map — but a kernel patchset that never upstreamed properly was never going to survive the long term. I told clients this in 2014, in 2018, and again in 2022. Mark my words, the same fate awaits any container runtime that depends on out-of-tree kernel modules.

The Virtuozzo 8 "hybrid" approach was dead on arrival. Too little, too late, too expensive. By 2026 you're either running proper KVM with hardware acceleration or you're running LXC on your own metal. Anything in between is a support burden nobody wants to carry.

Fun little project actually: I got a NAT VPS from some random summer host last month, 128MB RAM, OVZ7 kernel 5.4.something-xxx-std-ipv6-64. It actually works for a wireguard bounce point

# cat /proc/user_beancounters
Version: 2.5
uid resource held maxheld barrier limit
  kmemsize 8923456 12345678 134217728 150994944
  lockedpages 0 0 32 32
  privvmpages 27654 31289 32768 36044

The kernel is ancient but the cgroup v1 memory controller still does its job. Would I pay money for this in 2026? Idk, it was $4/year.

I'm more interested in whether anyone's running LXC unprivileged on these cheap ARM NAT boxes now. That's where the real fun is.

As @haroldgsm said, the support overhead was not proportional to the revenue.

Current OVHcloud stack: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/

• Proxmox VE 8.1
• KVM with virtio-net and virtio-scsi
• AMD EPYC 7443p or Intel Xeon E-2388G depending on location
• DDR4-3200 ECC, no DDR5 yet (supply chain)

Numbers for a typical 1GB plan:

• Geekbench 6 single: 1850-2100
• Disk: 850-1200 MB/s on ZFS RAID-10 (Samsung PM893)
• Network: 500 Mbit guaranteed, 1 Gbit burst

We still have three customers on OVZ7 from grandfathered plans. Two of them are running CentOS 6. I am not joking. The migration tickets are scheduled for their own protection.

The only place I see OVZ mentioned now is in legacy WHMCS module configurations that nobody wants to touch.

Anyway I stayed up until 4am trying to get ovz7 running on a raspberry pi 5 for no reason

root@nonsense:~# uname -a
Linux nonsense 6.1.21-v8+ #1642 SMP PREEMPT Mon Apr  3 17:24:16 BST 2023 aarch64 GNU/Linux
root@nonsense:~# vzctl start 101
Starting container...
vzctl : CT 101 : failed to start container: Operation not permitted

Idk why I do this. The kernel patches don't apply clean and even if they did, arm64 ovz was always experimental. Spent three hours on this for a container that would've run fine in lxc-user-nspawn

Saw some guy on a discord selling "ovz legacy nodes" out of a garage in latvia. $2/month for 512mb. Probably fake.

I run 52 boxes and I can tell you exactly how many are OVZ: zero. Used to be 8 back in 2021, all on some Contabo flash sale that was €4/month for 2GB. Those got migrated to KVM or died, can't remember which

Current breakdown:

• 34 KVM (various, mostly Vultr and Hetzner)
• 12 LXC on my own dedi (GreenCloudVPS E3-1230v6, $18/month, steal)
• 6 NAT VPS for monitoring
• 0 OVZ

The math just doesn't work anymore. Even the cheapest providers figured out that KVM on modern chips is basically free performance-wise. Why deal with kernel panics from a dead project?

Still got one box running ovz6 as a "museum piece" though. Boots maybe.

The cheapest ovz I found last month was $3/year from some random host on a discord. Recieved it, kernel was 3.10.0-1160.45.1.el7.x86_64 lol

Definitely not putting anything real on that. Im just using it as a dns forwarder for my other 9 vps

KVM from Hostinger is $2.99/mo now for 1GB and actually runs a modern kernel. A lot better deal if you ask me — https://www.hostinger.com

Ovz is dead, long live ovz I guess

• OpenVZ 7 reached end-of-life on June 30, 2024 per Virtuozzo's own advisory (VZA-2024-016).
• The last stable kernel branch was 3.10.0-1160.xx, based on RHEL 7.9, which itself goes EOL June 2028.
• No major control panel (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin) certifies on OpenVZ 7 as of 2026.
• KVM with virtio drivers is supported on every modern Linux distribution without guest modifications.

Practical recommendation: If you encounter a provider still offering OpenVZ on new orders, verify their kernel version and patch status. A provider running 3.10.x in 2026 is not patching CVEs in a timely manner, regardless of virtualization type. The risk profile exceeds the typical cost savings of low-end container hosting.

For container-native workloads, migrate to LXC 5.0+ with unprivileged containers and cgroup v2 resource controls. The tooling is standard in Ubuntu 22.04+, Debian 12+, and RHEL 9+

Just use KVM

Seriously. The "virtualization tax" people whine about hasn't been real since Sandy Bridge. If your workload is so latency-sensitive that 0.8% overhead matters, you shouldn't be on a $4/year VPS to begin with. Skill issue

The only people still running OVZ in 2026 are:

• Providers who haven't updated their website since 2019
• Guys with "museum piece" servers (looking at you hank)
• That one latvian discord guy nocturnal found at 4am

LXC exists. LXD exists. Incus exists. There is ZERO reason to deploy new OVZ. The fact that some of you are nostalgic for beancounters proves the human capacity for Stockholm syndrome is infinite

🐧 anyway I have to go recompile my kernel with -O3 for a 0.3% improvement in context switch latency