Virtuozzo Product Manager Carla Safigan talks about the enterprise-class product.
VSM: Tell us about Virtuozzo.
CS: Virtuozzo is an Operating System-level server virtualization solution. It creates isolated, secure virtual private servers (VPSs), or virtual environments on a single physical server, enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Virtuozzo is a unique virtualization solution that builds upon a standard operating system. Leveraging the underlying operating system enables Virtuozzo to support any hardware supported by Windows and Linux, including support for up to 16 CPU systems with 64 GB of RAM. The Virtuozzo architecture also draws on chip and OS advances such as full SMP and multicore technology; Virtuozzo uses technology from the industry leaders so there is little to no lag for support. Virtuozzo Linux offers additional flexibility by enabling multiple Linux distributions to coincide on the same server.
Virtuozzo was designed for production servers, which poses some distinct requirements: high resource efficiency, low operational overhead, extensive management tools and a strong ROI. Virtuozzo is far more scalable and resource efficient than other virtualization solutions because it has patent-pending technology that enables VPSs to access a single copy of the OS, allowing a very lean and efficient configuration. Virtuozzo also does not recreate any hardware access, so no additional processing is required and the difference in performance of applications on a standalone server and those on a Virtuozzo server is undetectable. Virtuozzo also has ingenious resource management capabilities that ensure all VPSs get required resources, and maximizes resource utilization on resources such as memory by sharing common memory pages and space. The extensive set of management tools, including templating and configuration management, make it simple for a single administrator to manage up to hundreds or thousands of VPSs. The intuitive GUI interface bridges the knowledge gap between Windows and Linux operating systems.
VSM: Who is the target audience for Virtuozzo? Have there been many deployments?
CS: SWsoft has more than 5,000 enterprise, government, academic and service provider customers and more than 200,000 VPSs in production around the globe. Virtuozzo is great for any business or organization with underutilized server hardware, which means just about any IT organization. Many of our customers are consolidating multiple servers to maximize hardware utilization and have secondarily leveraged the technology in many ways. We have a customer that has a CRM application with peak loads between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m., and a proprietary application that runs batch processing from 1:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. Placing the two applications on a single server has provided significant workload efficiencies.
We also have customers managing application growth by using the resource tools in Virtuozzo; additional CPU, memory and other resources can be adjusted without service interruption in real time. Server management can be taken a step further with what we call a smart configuration. Smart configurations usually include at least one business critical application and several other applications such as file servers with limited resource allowances. The less important virtualized servers can easily and quickly be moved to other physical servers when the critical application grows to the point where it needs additional resources. Smart configurations and moving virtualized servers enable IT departments to use expensive server resources well immediately, rather than over-provisioning and waiting for applications to grow.
We also have customers using Virtuozzo in development environments. The templating and cloning features in Virtuozzo make it a very powerful solution for patch and update management, and the complete isolation and flexibility make it a great tool for development and QA departments that require large quantities of servers and provision new servers often.
VSM: On the hardware virtualization side, how does Virtuozzo compare to VMware, Xen and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005?
CS: VMware and Microsoft were designed to support virtual servers with different OSs on the same physical server. By definition, each guest virtual server will have an entire OS copy, poorly using both the disk capacity and memory space. Also, the nature of the technology creates separate layers of processing. Applications run on either technology incur significant performance degradation.
Another virtualization option receiving attention is Xen, which is referred to as paravirtualization. Paravirtualization contains the same inherent overhead of technologies such as VMware with multiple complete instances of OSes with some enhancements to improve performance.
VSM: On the management and policy side, how does Virtuozzo compare to startups in this space like Cassatt, Virtual Iron and Qlusters?
CS: Cassatt management tools provide very specific functionality, focusing on server provisioning from a virtual pool of servers. The functionality is very different from Virtuozzo, where virtualization is the primary function of the software.
Virtual Iron is a virtualization solution primarily developed to span multiple servers, using a very expensive connectivity infrastructure to control latency issues. Every year, standard servers get faster, larger and more powerful. Most IT departments are having trouble using standard servers well, which contributes largely to the need for virtualizing servers to increase their utilization. Very few applications and configurations are going to require a solution such as Virtual Iron.
Qlusters is a Linux only solution, primarily focused on providing high availability solutions for applications. The solution copies information from an application’s memory to another server for faster failover recovery, this copy is in essence a “virtualized server” but far different from the full VPS server functionality in Virtuozzo. The solution requires adjustments to the application, so Qlusters is limited to custom or other applications where it can gain access to the application code.
VSM: And to management tools from VMware and Aurema?
CS: VMware has management tools for its higher end offering that are similar to the management tools for Virtuozzo. Many tools are separate and costly features; the biggest difference is VMotion, VMware’s zero-downtime migration tool. VMotion is only available for shared data on SAN installations. Virtuozzo includes near-zero downtime migration as a part of its core management tools on any VPS server on any network. Virtuozzo has patent-pending technology that migrates a server, keeping it available through the majority of the migration, and then only taking the VPS offline for a few seconds to finish the migration.
Aurema for VMware provides the memory management that is inherent in the Virtuozzo resource management. Aurema claims to resolve the resource issues and contention presented by memory leaks and runaway processes, protecting physical servers from crashing or having performance issues. Virtuozzo is designed to control these issues and provides administrators and VPS owners with the tools to control such issues.
VSM: What are the future plans for the product?
CS: Virtuozzo will continue to provide new innovations for server virtualization including broader support for 64 bit architectures and standalone server to VPS migration tools. In addition, Virtuozzo will continue to build advanced tools that help deploy and manage intelligent server infrastructures for customers.
SWsoft will continue to increase its investment in the Virtuozzo product line and extended team to meet increasing global customer demand. The company itself is growing very rapidly, in large part due to Virtuozzo’s success in the market.
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To find out more about SWsoft and Virtuozzo, visit www.sw-soft.com.
