LXC (also known as Linux containers) is a virtualization technology thatworks at the operating system level. This is different from hardwarevirtualization, the approach used by other hypervisors such as KVM, Xen,and VMware. LXC (as currently implemented using libvirt in the Computeservice) is not a secure virtualization technology for multi-tenantenvironments (specifically, containers may affect resource quotas forother containers hosted on the same machine). Additional containmenttechnologies, such as AppArmor, may be used to provide better isolationbetween containers, although this is not the case by default.For all these reasons, the choice of this virtualization technologyis not recommended in production.
If your compute hosts do not have hardware support for virtualization,LXC will likely provide better performance than QEMU. In addition,if your guests must access specialized hardware, such as GPUs,this might be easier to achieve with LXC than other hypervisors.
Note
Some OpenStack Compute features might be missing when running with LXCas the hypervisor. See the hypervisor support matrix for details.
To enable LXC, ensure the following options are set in /etc/nova/nova.confon all hosts running the nova-compute service.
compute_driver = libvirt.LibvirtDriver[libvirt]virt_type = lxc
On Ubuntu, enable LXC support in OpenStack by installing thenova-compute-lxc package.
