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Introduction

Today’s IT organizations are dealing with the consequences of exploding IT infrastructure growth and complexity. While computing resources continue to increase in power, organizations are unable to fully utilize them in single application deployments and cannot change computing resource assignments eas­ily when application or business requirements change. At the root of the problem is uncontrolled server sprawl, servers provisioned to support a single application. Organizations that implemented hardware virtualization have unwittingly created a new problem: OS sprawl. While hardware remains a considerable cost component, software and management continue to be the largest cost considerations. The daily management and operations functions are daunting, and adding in business continuity requirements, the costs and complexity are overwhelming. Moreover, few tools provide the management and automation to ease the burden on IT departments.

In order to address these critical challenges, IT organizations have to find ways to accomplish the follow­ing:

Improve the flexibility of computing resource assignment

Decrease complexity to improve manageability of systems

Automate routine tasks

Reduce overall management costs through efficiency

Provide cost-effective data availability and recovery

Increase the return from their infrastructure investment by better utilizing resources

Operating-system level virtualization and Virtuozzo empower IT organizations to meet these challenges and the increasing demands on IT infrastructure.

VIRTUOZZO OVERVIEW

Virtuozzo is an operating system level server virtualization solution. Virtuozzo creates isolated partitions or virtual environments (VEs) on a single physical server and OS instance to utilize hardware, software, data center and management efforts with maximum efficiency.
Virtuozzo’s OS virtualization solution has higher efficiency and manage­ability, making it the best solution for organizations concerned with containing the IT infrastructure and maximizing resource utilization. Virtuozzo’s complete set of manage­ment tools and unique architecture makes it the perfect solution for eas­ily maintaining, monitoring and man­aging virtualized server resources for consolidation and business continu­ity configurations.
The Virtuozzo low-overhead, efficient architecture maximizes server resources. SWsoft created a por­table layer to existing operating systems which adds a dynamic partition or Virtual Environment (VE) that resides on a common OS. The single thin Virtuozzo layer introduces only a small percentage of overhead and allows up to 100s of VEs to run on a physical server. This architecture allows a much more flexible, efficient and cost-effective solution for server management.
The enhanced design of the virtualization technology also enables any VE on any network to be easily and transparently moved to another server with near-zero downtime, enabling IT departments to more fully utilize existing servers and minimize or eliminate planned downtime.

 

PERFORMANCE

Virtuozzo’s unique form of virtualization not only eliminates complications that arise with hardware virtual¬ization, but its impact on server performance is so minimal that the server operates at near-native levels. The performance factors include:

System Calls

Virtuozzo has a common kernel, no additional systems calls are created between excess layers.

Filesystem

Common data is stored only once and is available to multiple environments, significantly improving the efficiency of both the disk space and system memory. The disk space for caching is also used efficiently, caching payload rather than duplicated data.

Filesystem Performance

Virtuozzo’s filesystem and efficient system call design create very small CPU usage overhead.

Filesystem buffers/cache in memory

Virtuozzo places a single instance of data and cache across the server, maximizing memory efficiency.

Memory Management

Virtuozzo handles memory allocation requests dynamically. Virtuozzo environments can use a lot of memory during load peaks, and users will fully benefit from running Virtuozzo on high-end servers. Applications in Virtuozzo environments can show very high peak per¬formance. Also, when environment resource demand grows gradually in time, Virtuozzo’s dynamic resource management allows increasing the resource allocation with no downtime.

ADVANTAGES

	Server Consolidation and OS Consolidation Virtuozzo takes consolidation a step further by consolidating OSs for easy management and reducing costs and complexity while improving service levels. Virtuozzo provides full isolation between applications and its lean architecture allows a high server density. The unique Virtuozzo architecture further accelerates the cost savings by reducing software licensing and support costs and through extensive management tools that help automate server management tasks.
	Business Continuity Virtuozzo can be a cost-effective component of any disaster recovery/ high availability solution, from an always available solution, to a fast recovery or backup recovery solution. Virtuozzo is the perfect solution for housing redundant servers that can be activated as necessary. Virtuozzo's mean time to repair (MTTR) is much shorter than many other options because of the smaller server virtualization footprint. It also has a much faster boot time because only the processes and data are booting, the operating system is already available. Virtuozzo migration capabilities allow VEs to be moved in real-time with near-0 downtime (keeping the application available through the migration until the last few seconds), and no SAN is required.
	Centralized Desktop Management IT organizations are centralizing desktop applications and making them available from virtualized servers. These virtualized applications are available on servers and are accessible to end users to provide a secure, controlled and manageable environment. Applications can be created and deployed in secure virtual environments which prevent viruses from spreading over computers. Applications are centralized for easy updates and ongoing management.
	Dynamic Workload Management Application or business requirements in most organizations change daily. Deploying an application used to require a certain amount of planning and commitment to configuration and server placement. With Virtuozzo, workloads in VEs can be easily moved with live migration or resources adjusted in real-time without downtime. Virtuozzo is the first virtualization solution that combines low-overhead and an amazing ROI that can actually be justified to support a single virtualized server on a physical server.

 

Virtuozzo VS Hardware Virtualization

Hardware virtualization has its benefits. At least on the leading market solution, just about any operating system is supported. It is possible to load Windows next Linux next to Solaris, and it still supports older OSs. Despite the benefits, the flexibility of this type of solution comes with a lot of overhead and inefficiencies.

Many organizations find that after deploying a hardware virtualization solution, they loaded an entire server with virtual machines all running the same operating system. This happens for a variety of rea¬sons, mainly because most organizations have enough servers to consolidate like operating systems and the system administrator supporting the server has the skill set of that OS. Suddenly, that goal of loading any operating system on a single server doesn't warrant the associated overhead of this type of flexibility.

Further limitations inherent to hardware virtualization lead to additional overheads and inefficiencies, as addressed in the following points:

1. A single application has two OSs to traverse; the guest-level OS and the hypervisor or host OS. More processing equates to slower responses and more overhead.
2. Each OS takes space in memory, and memory is always the most constrained resource on a server. While some vendors have taken steps to maximize memory usage, the inefficiencies still exist.
3. The duplicate OSs consume hard drive space and must be licensed and managed separately. Be­cause virtual machines don’t need hardware justification, many IT organizations are now starting to see OS sprawl instead of server sprawl.
4. Hardware support and interoperability for all of the hardware on the market is difficult to emulate well, so it is often a source of slower response times and higher processing overhead.

As an OS-level virtualization solution, Virtuozzo uses a single standard Operating System on a server. Not only does this model eliminate the inefficiencies of hardware virtualization, but there are advantages inherent to this approach

1. Performance

-      Virtuozzo uses all of the real hardware and OS software. There are no rewritten drivers or OS technology. There is also very little or no delay in supporting new technologies and it performs at near-native server levels.
-      There is no duplicate OS, so it again performs very efficiently.
-      Because of the near native server performance, Virtuozzo is used to virtualize high I/O applica­tions such as data bases and email servers.

1. Scalability

-      The flexible design allows any VE to seamlessly scale to the resources of the entire server.
-      The lean architecture ensures that nearly all of the system resources are available for use by VEs.
-      Virtuozzo fully supports native 2 bit and bit systems, 1CPUs SMP support and GB RAM on the host as well in as in VEs.

1. Density
2. Because of the single OS, memory and other technology efficiencies, Virtuozzo has the highest density of any virtualization solution. It is possible to deploy up to 100’s of VEs on a regular two-way x8server. This high density equates to the fastest ROI of any virtualization solution.

4. Manageability

There is only a single OS to manage, maintain and license. Even if OS vendors forget they are managing the hardware below rather than the applications above, and change their licensing models, the management savings will make the extra licensing costs worthwhile.

Application management may also be centralized and managed as a single instance.

One update can patch multiple VEs on multiple servers.

Many operations are automated and scriptable, making management of many servers and VEs simple.

OSs and other software can be created in a VE as simple links making the footprint small opera­tions extremely fast. For example, a VE is created in seconds, and clones or migrations take less time because only the active or different data is moved rather than an entire operating system.

The comprehensive resource management ensures that all required resources are provided as configured for each VE. It also allows VEs to use available resources and make changes in near real-time.





 

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