It has been more than a decade since we released Virtuozzo containers. Back then Linux kernel lacked isolation technologies and we had to implement those as a custom kernel patch. Since then we have worked closely with the community to bring these technologies to upstream. Today they are a part of most modern Linux kernels and this release is the first that will benefit significantly from our joint efforts and the strong upstream foundation.
This is an early technology preview of Virtuozzo 7. We have made some good progress, but this is just the beginning. Much more still needs to be done. At this point we replaced the containers engine and made our tools work with the new kernel technologies. We consider this beta a major milestone on the road to the official Virtuozzo 7 release and want to share the progress with our customers.
This Virtuozzo 7.0 Technical Preview offers the following significant improvements:
- Virtuozzo 7 is based on RHEL7 and Kernel 3.10+
- Containers are using kernel features cgroups and namespaces that limit, account for, and isolate resource usage as isolated namespaces of a collection of processes. The beancounters interface remains in place for backward compatibility. At the same time it acts as a proxy for actual cgroups and namespaces implementation.
- UUID instead of VEID for container identification. You can now identify containers by their UUIDs or names. By default vzctl will treat the 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 a userspace daemon.
Read more details in official announce.