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OpenVZ is highly scalable virtualization technology for Linux with near-zero overhead, strong isolation and rapid customer provisioning that's is ready for production use right now. Deployment of OpenVZ improves efficiency, flexibility and quality of service in the enterprise environment.

Virtual Machines machines boot separate kernels on emulated hardware instances. OpenVZ runs all containers under a single Linux kernel. OpenVZ offers much higher density, hosting thousands of containers on a single physical server, but can only run Linux in those containers. Virtual machine solutions usually top out at a few dozen instances, but can run different operating systems in each.

OpenVZ develops new container technology that then goes upstream into the vanilla Linux kernel. OpenVZ has about a 5 year headstart head start on LXC, but is actively feeding technology upstream into vanilla containers. Several internal details currently differ (OpenVZ adds new system calls, vanilla uses the cgroups filesystem, new clone flags, and other mechanisms). '''What applications can run inside an OpenVZ container? ''' Applications and services do not have to be aware of OpenVZ, and most install are installed without any modifications: Java, Oracle, DB/2, Weblogic, Websphere and many other big applications run just fine inside OpenVZ containers. However, direct access to hardware is not available by default; if required it must be provided by the system administrator.