Virtuozzo’s Mature Linux Distribution VzLinux Now Available to Public
May 26, 2021
Virtuozzo released its latest VzLinux operating system (VzLinux 8) to the general public. VzLinux – an enterprise distribution – has been used by Virtuozzo as a base OS for the company’s OpenVZ virtualization solution and other commercial products as well as a guest OS for more than 20 years. Web hosting service providers and other end customers deploying the technology gain the immediate benefits of a stable, long-term supported Linux distro maintained by the open-source community.
VzLinux 8 is a free, multi-purpose distro optimized to run in containers, virtual machines or on bare-metal servers. It is designed to support I/O-intensive, enterprise-level applications and workloads. Virtuozzo currently offers a ready-to-use utility to convert from CentOS 8 without downtime as well as templates for hyperscalers, enabling customers to deploy VzLinux 8 as a guest OS under various hypervisors. The conversion utility enables seamless conversions of CentOS 8 bare-metal servers, virtual machines and containers, effectively managing risk while minimizing negative business impact. Regarding containers, Virtuozzo provides advanced functionality including conversion dry-run, snapshot creation to roll back and unattended mass conversion. Options to convert from CentOS 7 will be made available in a future update.
Notably, VzLinux is a 1:1 binary compatible fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux-specifically RHEL 8.
“The enterprise Linux distribution market is shifting away from CentOS-dominated Linux servers given the distro’s slated sunset later this year,” said Maik Broemme, Senior Product Manager, Virtuozzo. “The resulting gap in the market requires a reliable solution with longevity, which is why we opted to make our VzLinux publicly available. We simply aim to give the industry a viable, free alternative with seamless transition capabilities.”
Virtuozzo has a long history of sponsoring and contributing to well-known open-source projects such as OpenVZ, KVM, Docker, OpenStack, CRIU. The company’s confidence in its VzLinux distro has led to an in-house conversion of more than 200+ CentOS servers, ensuring Virtuozzo’s infrastructure is future-proofed well beyond December 2021 when CentOS is slated for end-of-life.
To download VzLinux 8 and for contributions to the VzLinux project, visit www.vzLinux.org.
