Some years ago we introduced our own hypervisor technology in Virtuozzo in addition to our containers. Such an offering added more flexibility to Virtuozzo, as in some cases customers preferred traditional hypervisor solutions over containers. Fast and reliable, Virtuozzo hypervisor offered a lot of enterprise features answering the needs of service providers.
Nowadays KVM has become fast and reliable enough to suite our customers' needs. For this reason, we do not need to develop and support our own hypervisor anymore. Yet KVM still lacks many required features and we are eager to implement such functionality in our new Virtuozzo 7 with KVM-based virtualization.
The two technical previews of Virtuozzo 7 we released before were focused mostly on container technology, whereas this beta is focused on KVM-based virtual machines.
Key changes in Virtuozzo 7 Beta are:
- Unified management of containers and virtual machines,
- Transition from own hypervisor to KVM,
- Online memory management for containers and VMs,
- Memory guarantees for containers and VMs,
- Features enabling VM memory overcommitment: memory autoballooning and kernel same-page merging (KSM).
- Ability to manage containers and VMs with libvirt and virt-manager,
- Guest tools for Windows and Linux VMs.
We are still working to improve the memory overcommitment mechanism to allow the commercial customers to increase density with a minimal impact on performance for end-users.
The main goal of Virtuozzo 7 Beta is to assure of our customers of the complete CLI and SDK compatibility between Virtuozzo 6 and Virtuozzo 7 that allows managing containers and new KVM-based virtual machines.
In this homework you will walk through the new Virtuozzo 7 features using a container and a virtual machine with a CentOS 7 distribution.
