Virtuozzo (company)

The company was founded in 1997 under the name SWsoft and maintained its headquarters in Herndon, Virginia with additional offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Its research and development offices were located in Moscow, Russia, and it had sales offices in Germany and Singapore. In January 2002, the Virtuozzo 2.0 containers virtualization solution was released. In 2003, SWsoft acquired the makers of Confixx and Plesk web hosting products,[4] and expanded its presence in Germany and Novosibirsk, Russia. In December 2007, after the acquisition of Parallels, Inc., SWsoft company announced its plans to change its name to Parallels and distribute its products under the Parallels brand name.[5]

In December 2015, Virtuozzo spun off and became a standalone company, lead by entrepreneur and former Parallels exec Rob Lovell.[6][1] In May 2016, Virtuozzo announced its intention to join the Open Container Initiative[7] and plans to develop dedicated cloud-based servers as well as a specialized Linux distribution.[8] That same month, Virtuozzo launched the Virtuozzo Application Catalog, which was developed in partnership with Bitnami.[9] Virtuozzo announced a strategic partnership with Jelastic in August 2016 to produce Virtuozzo DevOps, an application orchestration platform aimed at mid to large size companies.[10] The company named George Karidis its CEO in November 2016. Karidis previously headed the cloud business unit at CompuCom.[1]

In April 2017, Virtuozzo partnered with Packet.net to distribute Virtuozzo software through Packet.[11]

Virtuozzo is an operating system-level server virtualization solution designed to centralize server management and consolidate workloads by reducing the number of physical servers required. Organizations use Virtuozzo for server consolidation, disaster recovery, and server workload agility. Virtuozzo does not generate a virtual machine on a host OS like traditional VM software, but instead, it creates isolated virtual private servers (VPSs) on a single physical server. For instance, the software can run multiple Linux VPSs, but not Linux and Windows at the same time on the same server. Each VPS performs exactly like a stand-alone server and can be rebooted independently.[12]

Virtuozzo for Linux became available in 2001 while a version that supports 32- and 64-bit microprocessors became available in 2005.[13][12] In 2002, Virtuozzo proved that the 2.5 version of its software could run 2,500 instances of Red Hat Linux on an eight-processor Dell server. As a result, Intel partnered with Virtuozzo in 2002 to develop a partitioning technology for IA-64 processors.[14]

Linux architectures that support Virtuozzo for Linux are x86, ia64, AMD64, EM64T, and Itanium. Virtuozzo for Linux enables multiple Linux distributions to exist simultaneously on one server.[15] It is based on OpenVZ, a Linux-based OS-level virtualization technology, which allows a physical server to run multiple isolated operating system instances. In 2005, the company updated Virtuozzo to support 64-bit x86 processors.[16] Virtuozzo requires at least a Pentium III server with at least 1 GB of memory and 4 GB available hard drive. Virtuozzo’s management tools will be compatible with Microsoft’s Viridian and Virtual Server software. Virtuozzo's container staging is processed through the company's container platform OpenVZ.[7][17] Virtuozzo 7, which incorporated an optimized Kernel-based Virtual Machine, was released in July 2016.[18]

In 2012, the company released Virtuozzo Storage, a targeted container storage. The second version of Virtuozzo Storage was released in 2017.[19]