Virtuozzo, powering more than five million virtual environments as the leading virtualization platform for service providers, announced general availability of Virtuozzo 7. With this new version, the platform ushers in a new level of portability, reliability, and performance, especially for customers in large datacenter environments where vendor flexibility, as well as low latency, is critical. 

"Virtuozzo 7 is the most agnostic, agile, and cost effective virtualization platform on the market today," said Alexey Kobets, senior vice president of Research and Development, Virtuozzo. "It combines our own optimized KVM and the ability to create system containers in a single hyper-converged platform. Leveraging the entire Virtuozzo 7 product stack--or utilizing standalone products within it, such as Virtuozzo Storage--gives our partners the flexibility and efficiency required to run their business across multiple clouds with the lowest total cost of ownership." 

Virtuozzo 7 has the ability to run applications or services in containers and hypervisors side-by-side, providing a truly consolidated view of compute, networking, and storage, for ease of management.  Additionally, Virtuozzo supports any orchestration solution such as OpenStack or platforms built in-house.

"The market for hyperconverged integrated systems (HCIS) will grow 79% to reach almost $2 billion in 2016, propelling it toward mainstream use in the next five years" according to Gartner. "HCIS will be the fastest-growing segment of the overall market for integrated systems, reaching almost $5 billion, which is 24 percent of the market, by 2019." 

The new platform includes an updated kernel to the latest version of CentOS (3.10+), providing even more stability and performance, while reinforcing Virtuozzo's commitment to open source software. With this update, a new feature called ReadyKernel enables rebootless and instant patching of the kernel to power highly sensitive and critical applications which require continuous security management and uptime. 

Virtuozzo 7 highlights include:    

• Optimized KVM with rebuilt hypervisor core on top of open-source KVM resulting in better density, performance and security.
• Rebootless kernel updates with ReadyKernel.
• Enterprise grade, 24x7 support.
• More than 200 enhancements, including backup and out-of-the-box high availability and advanced memory management that outperforms CentOS KVM by up to 33 percent.
• Additional Docker support including new storage plugin.
• Virtuozzo Storage outperforms Ceph - the most popular open source software-defined storage by 10x or more, on identical hardware.
• Advanced Windows support added to KVM allows customers to run Linux and Windows workloads with the same features and level of stability.
  

"We've successfully relied on Virtuozzo for 10 years as our virtualization provider," said Dave Idle, vice president, Product Marketing, Web.com. "As we look to expand our services, it made sense for us to consider them for these next generation service tiers. Virtuozzo 7 provides us with one consistent platform regardless of where our infrastructure resides.  Whether it's public or private, Virtuozzo arms us with the portability, flexibility and elasticity to support our clients' requirements effectively and efficiently."

The cost to maintain open source or proprietary software has always been a concern to enterprises and service providers. Virtuozzo 7 offers a TCO three times lower than open source and five times lower than proprietary software and popular commercial hypervisor vendors.

"ViUX has successfully relied upon Virtuozzo for 10 years as our virtualization system," said J.T. Smith, owner, ViUX. "As other options for virtualization became available, we've stayed with Virtuozzo as our provider because it has continually exceeded other systems in performance, features, and price--which enhanced our business bottom line over those years. The cloud storage feature of Virtuozzo has been invaluable in allowing ViUX to provide high-availability cloud VPS containers and hypervisors to increase ARPU."

"We've successfully relied on Virtuozzo for nearly a decade as our virtualization provider," said Todd Robinson, president, InMotion Hosting. "We also recently adopted Virtuozzo Storage for InMotion's new choose your own stack cloud hosting.  As a trusted partner that consistently outperforms other vendors, we will continue to look first at Virtuozzo for new technologies, like KVM and Docker, for our next generation of service tiers."

You can get a free 30-day trial via the Virtuozzo website.