Virtuozzo’s Mature Linux Distribution VzLinux Now Available to Public

Virtuozzo, a world leader in high-efficiency virtualization and hyperconverged software solutions, today made available to the general public its latest VzLinux operating system (VzLinux 8). For more than 20 years, Virtuozzo has used VzLinux, an enterprise distribution, as a base OS for the company's OpenVZ virtualization solution and other commercial products, as well as a guest OS. Web hosting companies and other end users that deploy the technology benefit immediately from a stable, long-term supported Linux distribution maintained by the open-source community.

VzLinux 8 is a free, multi-purpose software designed to run in containers, virtual machines, or on bare-metal servers. It is intended to support I/O-heavy, enterprise-level applications and workloads. Virtuozzo currently provides a ready-to-use utility for converting from CentOS 8 with no downtime, as well as hyperscaler templates that allow customers to run VzLinux 8 as a guest OS under several hypervisors. The conversion utility allows for the seamless conversion of CentOS 8 bare-metal servers, virtual machines, and containers, efficiently managing risk while minimizing business impact. In terms of containers, Virtuozzo provides sophisticated features such as conversion dry-run, snapshot creation for rollback, and unattended mass conversion. Converting options from CentOS 7 will be available in a future update.

“With CentOS's scheduled exit later this year, the enterprise Linux distribution market is shifting away from CentOS-dominated Linux servers,” stated Maik Broemme, Senior Product Manager, Virtuozzo. “The resulting market gap requires a dependable solution with longevity, which is why we chose to make our VzLinux publicly available.” We simply want to provide the industry with a viable, free alternative that enables a seamless transition.”

Virtuozzo has long supported and contributed to well-known open-source projects including OpenVZ, KVM, Docker, OpenStack, and CRIU. The company's confidence in its VzLinux distribution has led to the conversion of more than 200 CentOS servers in-house, ensuring Virtuozzo's infrastructure is future-proofed well beyond December 2021, when CentOS is set to be taken down.

About Virtuozzo

Virtuozzo is a leading global provider of software solutions for hybrid virtualization, storage, and cloud enablement. The company's software-defined, hyperconverged self-service platform and resource management capabilities enable hosting and service providers to offer public and private cloud services to their clients. Virtuozzo is a pioneer in the industry, having created the first commercially accessible container technology 21 years ago. Over 450 service providers, ISVs, and enterprises worldwide use the company's software solutions and services to enable over 500 thousand virtual environments running mission-critical cloud workloads. Virtuozzo, a major force in the open-source community, sponsors and/or contributes to several open-source projects, including KVM, Docker, OpenStack, OpenVZ, CRIU, and the Linux kernel.