Review: SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows 3.5.1 – Installation

Virtuozzo is powered by a flexible distributed architecture offering several tiers:

  • a hardware node tier (where our VPSs will be hosted)
  • a backup node tier (where our VPSs could be backupped)
  • a monitor node tier (useful for HNs resources usage remote check)
  • a workstation node tier (useful for HNs remote management)

Having a backup node isn’t really needed in small installations but it’s highly recommended.
If you plan to have one you should consider using a host powered by large network storage unit drives, reachable by fibre channel or iSCSI.

In the same way a monitor node isn’t mandatory, but quite needful if you plan to use VPSs dynamic distribution capabilities of Virtuozzo.

For this review we’ll use a simple stand alone installation.
Virtuozzo 3.5.1 at present just supports Windows Server 2003 platforms (x32 and x64 architectures) so we already know we can only have multiple Win2003 Virtual Private Servers.

The installation process is pretty fast and automatically invokes an Internet update to check new patches availability (highly recommended since SWsoft support team release fixes very often).
In any moment to verify your installed version just type on command prompt:

C:\> vzctl –version
Immediately after a configuration wizard starts to help you configuring your HN. It will ask you the Windows installation CD to include several components (like IIS) you probably left out in your fresh plain installation: they will need to be available for VPSs requests.
Then the wizard will ask you to define network properties of the Service VPS, which is a special VPS needed to handle remote management requests by the Win32 console (Virtuozzo Management Console) or the web console (Virtuozzo Power Panels):

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