Without any fanfare, at the beginning of September, Parallels released Virtuozzo Containers (formerly Virtuozzo) 4.5.
Version 4, launched in January, unified for the first time the Windows and Linux branches, introducing major new features like virtual SMP masking and support for Microsoft and Red Hat cluster services.
Version 4.5, which is built on this new architecture, brings in a wire range of new capabilities:
- Enhanced resource management (CPU pools, vCPUs remapping on logical CPUs, offline vHD fragmentation)
- Containers cloning
- Containers startup order
- Support for Windows Server 2008 (32/64bit, with or without Hyper-V, up to Service Pack 1) and its new Failover Clustering
- Support for Hyper-V (it’s not exactly clear if this just means that the Hyper-V parent partition can be segmented in containers, or something else)
- Support for TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) NICs inside the containers
- Support for new 3rd party backup and anti-virus solutions (including the ones provided by AVG, CA, EMC, IBM, McAfee, Symantec and F-Secure)
- Support for iSCSI inside the containers (a container can be an Initiator)
- Support for IPv6 addresses inside the containers
It’s not entirely clear why Parallels didn’t promote in any way what is still considered its flagship product.
It is true that the large majority of the attention is focused on hardware virtualization, but the company OS virtualization platform should still have a competitive advantage over VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors in the hosting industry, which is well worth some more marketing effort.