Virtuozzo: Product Overview and Insight

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Bottom Line:

Virtuozzo is not one of the market leaders in virtualization software, but its platform offers significant functionality. It can virtualize Windows servers, yet it is more focused on the Linux and open source markets.

Think of its a less expensive alternative for enterprise data centers – with enough of a toolset to handle a larger facility. It competes directly with Red Hat virtualization and other open-source platforms such as Proxmox and KVM, with one its chief selling points being lower pricing.

Product Description:

Virtuozzo has the aim of lowering costs and delivering more value with software-defined storage, virtualization and containers in one package. It adds more than 200 features to the popular open source KVM virtualization platform, while remaining compatible.

The Virtuozzo hypervisor can be used as a standalone product or as part of bigger OpenStack installations. It’s based on CentOS7 KVM and a modern version of QEMU:

2.3.0, which allow virtual machines to run with no vendor-specific changes that could cause incompatibilities. It is also optimized to support the Microsoft family so Windows guests can run on top. Implemented on millions of virtual environments, Virtuozzo is equipped with encrypted containers built on the new Linux kernel.

Its software-defined storage capabilities allow users to build fault-tolerant, scalable, and high-performance storage clusters using existing or off-the-shelf hardware. They can set up storage for blocks, files, S3 objects, and containers, and it has built-in replication. But unlike traditional hypervisor-based virtualization, Virtuozzo software runs on top of the operating system.

“Virtuozzo creates multiple independent virtual environments on a single physical server. This allows hardware, time and effort to be shared in systems management and sometimes even software licenses across multiple virtual environment,” said an IT Engineer in a small business

Servers/Operating Systems:

Windows and Linux

Implementation:

Can be deployed either via command line tools (i.e. CLI) or web management panel.

Scalability:

About 50 virtualization instances per server. May have trouble scaling to large enterprise levels.

Overhead:

5% to 20%

Management:

There are plenty of KVM-based management products available that are compatible including Eucalyptus and Morpheus.

Patching/Backup:

Virtuozzo Hypervisor comes with a backup solution installed. There are no agent-based backups from third parties required. Kernels can be upgraded without rebooting

and with no freeze time thanks to ReadyKernel, which is based on kpatch technology.

Virtuozzo Hypervisor takes advantage of a catalog of over 100 apps and OSes, which are patched by the Virtuzzo team within 48 hours.

Migration:

To facilitate hardware upgrades and load balancing between multiple hosts, Virtuozzo enables you to migrate virtual machines and containers between physical servers via command line interface.

Security:

Virtuozzo includes encrypted containers but is otherwise light on security. It does not include access controls for its storage, does not protect from traffic sniffing, and is missing other security features. These can be obtained from the open-source community.

Key Markets:

KVM users

Open source software users

Small to mid-sized businesses.

Cost:

$990 a month for the enterprise.