FAQ/en

General

So what is Virtuozzo?

Virtuozzo is a Linux based virtualization platform, combining container and hypervisor virtualization, into a single product. While primarily built for service providers to run cloud services and applications, it is used by variety of businesses, including MSP, SMB and Enterprises.

What is OpenVZ and how it compares to Virtuozzo?

OpenVZ is a free and opensource portion of Virtuozzo. It includes core of Virtuozzo functionality, like kernel and command line management tools for creating and managing containers. Virtuozzo includes everything that OpenVZ does, plus additional features and services available with the commercial version only.

How does Virtuozzo 7/OpenVZ pair compares to its predecessor (Virtuozzo versions 4.x and 6/OpenVZ)

Previously, OpenVZ and Virtuozzo were built out of the same code base with some unique patches applied. That warranted the user interfaces to be similar but not identical. With Virtuozzo 7, the compatibility will be on the binary level - effectively the open source components will be the same between OpenVZ and Virtuozzo.

How OpenVZ users will benefit from it?

OpenVZ components will be undergoing the same testing procedures as the commercial product. Also, some new features previously available on Virtuozzo only (notably hypervisor) will become available on the product built for OpenVZ community users.

What support options are available for Virtuozzo 7?

For the moment, only preview (beta) versions of Virtuozzo 7 are available. They are intended for development and testing only, not for production. Virtuozzo 7 is not yet commercially supported. For supported commercial version, please refer to Virtuozzo 6.

Why I need Virtuozzo/OpenVZ when LXC exist?

See our comparison of different virtualization solutions.

When OpenVZ will be in upstream kernel?

Our kernel developers work hard to merge containers functionality into the upstream Linux kernel, making OpenVZ team the biggest contributor to Linux Containers (LXC) kernel, with features such as PID and network namespaces, memory controller, checkpoint-restore and much more.

I want to show my appreciation to OpenVZ and put some logo to my site. Where to get it?

See Artwork.

What kind of documentation is available?

Aside from this wiki, which contains lots of information, you can check extensive manual pages and Virtuozzo documentation.

Who needs OpenVZ? How it can be used?

See Use cases.

How scalable is OpenVZ?

OpenVZ technology scales as well as standard Linux kernel — up to thousands of CPUs and terabytes of RAM. Read more about OpenVZ containers density and performance.

Installation and upgrade

How to install OpenVZ?

There are two versions of OpenVZ:

• stable version: OpenVZ legacy (based on RHEL5 and RHEL6 kernels).
• development version: Virtuozzo Linux distribution based on RHEL7 kernel.

See Quick installation

What hardware is supported by OpenVZ kernel?

See RHEL Hardware Compatibility List.

How existing OpenVZ users can upgrade to the new version?

While there is no in-place upgrade, we prepared upgrade script for OpenVZ users to move their containers to the new platform. The script allows to transfer containers from old to new OpenVZ version (or from OpenVZ to Virtuozzo).