What is Virtuozzo

[megri]

Virtuozzo™ creates multiple isolated Virtual Private Servers (VPSs) on a single physical server to share hardware, licenses and management effort with maximum efficiency. Each VPS performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server for its users and applications as it can be rebooted independently and has its own root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.

[Seob]

Is it open source?

[Guest]

SWsoft Virtuozzo is a patented OS virtualization solution. Virtuozzo creates isolated virtual environments (VE) or containers on a single physical server and OS instance. Compared to other virtualization technologies, Virtuozzo offers the highest levels of density, performance and manageability.

Intelligent Partitioning - Division of a server into as many as hundreds of VEs with full server functionality.

Complete Isolation - VEs are secure and have full functional, fault and performance isolation.

Dynamic Resource Allocation - CPU, memory, network, disk and I/O can be changed without re-booting.

Live Migration - Business continuity capabilities including live migration ensure data is available and recoverable.

M*** Management - Suite of tools and templates for automated, multi-VE and multi-server administration.

[Varun]

I have more points on it

INTRO

Virtuozzo is a proprietary operating system virtualization product produced by SWsoft, Inc. A version that supports Linux has been available since 2001; a version that supports Microsoft Windows became available in 2005.

Description

Virtuozzo creates multiple, isolated virtual environments (VEs, otherwise known as Virtual Private Servers, or VPSs) on a single physical server. This allows the sharing of hardware, systems management effort, and sometimes software licenses among different workloads.

The VE behaves in most respects as if it were a stand-alone server. Each VE has its own superuser (root or Administrator), set of users/groups, IP address(es), processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files. The VE is completely accessible via the network. Due to virtualized network stack, a VE owner can have his own routing tables and firewall (iptables) rules.

Virtuozzo can support tens to hundreds of VEs on a single server due to its use of operating system-level virtualization. The host OS can be Linux or Windows. With a Windows host OS, the virtual environments on the server have to be the same OS as the host OS. For example, a host machine running Windows 2003 would have VEs also running Windows Server 2003. The Linux edition is more flexible, allowing VEs to appear to have different distributions of Linux.

Operating system-level virtualization

For more details on this topic, see Operating system-level virtualization.

Virtuozzo virtualizes at the operating system level, rather than the hardware level as other Virtual Machine (VM) products frequently do. Whereas VMs attempt to virtualize "a complete set of hardware," VEs represent a "lighter" abstraction, virtualizing instead "an operating system instance". All VEs run atop a single operating system kernel. The VE mechanism multiplexes this one OS kernel to look like multiple OS (and server) instances, especially from the perspective of running applications, users, and network services. Virtuozzo is based on OpenVZ, which is available under the GNU General Public License, and its concepts are similar to several other operating system-level virtualization implementations, including Solaris Containers, Linux-VServer and FreeBSD Jail.

Because they virtualize less, VEs impose lower overhead than VMs. As a result, more VEs can be supported on a given server. Virtuozzo supports servers with up to 64 x86 CPUs and 64 GB of RAM, but 1-4 CPU systems are far more common in practice.

Comparison to other technologies

Virtuozzo is a different approach to virtualization based on a different architecture from most other virtualization technologies. Virtuozzo was designed to be a low-overhead, fast-performing solution with many tools for simple management, since its early adopters include service providers with thousands of VEs to manage. The technology is based on a single OS flavor for a server, which means that a Windows server can only host Windows VEs and that a Linux servers can only host Linux VEs.

Since 2001, Virtuozzo has been running in service provider environments, which house hundreds of different customers on a single server, without an external firewall. Because they rely on the services of a single kernel, all VEs on a given server run the same kernel, but everything else — system libraries, configuration and program files — can be different in different VEs. That means that different Linux distributions can coexist on a single Virtuozzo for Linux server.

With Warm Regards

Varun

[fromtimetotime]

Can you compare Virtuozzo price to other available on the market virtualization technologies?