Parallels today announced a new version of its container and hardware virtualization platform Virtuozzo. Appearantly the product was renamed earlier to Parallels Cloud Server, but with this version Parallels decided to rename the product back again to its orginal name Virtuozzo (to be precise it was named Virtuozzo Containers earlier).
Virtuozzo is installed directly on the server hardware and does not need any operating system to function. Once it is installed, Virtuozzo allows you to create virtual machines and Containers.
Version 6 (well actually version 6.0 Update 9) provides support for running Docker Containers inside the Virtuozzo containers, which sounds confusing. Parallels describes why you would want to run Docker inside their container technology in a blogpost though. Parallels states that by using their container technology to host Docker containers a few shortcomings of the Docker container technology when run by Service Providers can be mitigated.
- Security (the ability of root to break out of the container environment)
- Isolation (the ability of one container to steal resources that are needed to service another container)
- Migration (the ability to move a running Dockerized application from one node to another without requiring a restart)
Parallels states that currrently service providers run Docker on top of a VM to mitigate the issues described above, causing a performance penalty. Parallels describes that the above issues in the future will be mitigated in a future version of Linux but untill that time the Virtuozzo technology could solve the issues.
To me, renaming a product to a new product name (Parallels Cloud Server) and then just before releasing a new version supporting a hot technology (in this case Docker) renaming it back again (Virtuozzo) seems like a panic move by Parallels in the hope to hop on the Container Virtualization bandwagon. It their strategy will work, time will tell.