While virtualization technologies such as VMware, Xen and KVM provide full virtualization and can run multiple operating systems and different kernel versions, OpenVZ uses a single Linux kernel and therefore can run only Linux.

The modified kernel provides virtualization, isolation, resource management, and checkpointing.

As of vzctl 4.0, OpenVZ can work with unpatched Linux 3.x kernels, with a reduced feature set.

This file can then be transferred to another machine and a container can be unfrozen (restored) there; the delay is roughly a few seconds.

A graphical user interface called EasyVZ was attempted in 2007,[9] but it did not progress beyond version 0.1.