Virtuozzo 7 Technical Preview - Containers

We are pleased to announce the official release of Virtuozzo 7.0 Beta 1. This is our first public release.

More than ten years ago we released Virtuozzo containers. At that moment Linux kernel lacked isolation technologies and we had to implement it as a custom kernel patch. Since then we worked closely with the community to bring these technologies to upstream. Today it is part of most modern Linux kernels and there is no value in continue using proprietary technologies. So we made a decision to switch to upstream technologies as a strong foundation for the future of our product. 

This is an early technology preview for Virtuozzo 7. We have made some good progress, but this is just a beginning. We still have a lot more to be done. At this point of time you won't see new cool features. We replaced an engine for containers and made our tools work with the new kernel technologies. We consider this delivery as major milestone on the road to official Virtuozzo 7 release and want to share the progress with our customers. In the future we'll be sharing our development progress continuously. The next step is introducing new virtual machines based on KVM. And then more features are coming.

Features

Virtuozzo 7.0 Beta 1 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system:

• Virtuozzo 7 is based on RHEL7 kernel;
• Containers are using kernel features cgroups and namespaces that limits, accounts for and isolates the resource usage as isolate namespaces of a collection of processes. Bean Counters interface remains in place for backward compatibility. At the same time it acts as a proxy for actual cgroups and namespace implementation;
• UUID instead of VEID for container identification. You can use UUID or name to identify a container. By default vzctl will treat former VEID parameter as name;
• VCMM 4th generation of memory manager. We switched to memcg. By balancing and configuring memcg limits we will get the exact overcommit, shadow gangs, swap, page cache overuse Virtuozzo parameters. This will be done by user-space daemon.

Known issues

• Cannot boot Virtuozzo 7 Beta 1 with EFI. (#PSBM-34786)
• Autopartitioning for standard partitions in the Virtuozzo 7 Beta 1 installer does not work. (#PSBM-34787)
• Installation may stop due to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 bug. In this case, restart installation. For details, see RHEL bug #1167948. (#PSBM-34797)
• netconsole cannot be used along with bridged containers. (#PSBM-34959)
• Container console does not work in Openstack

Download

• Installation ISO images

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