Virtuozzo, a hyperconverged infrastructure software provider, today announced the latest release of its integrated container, hypervisor and storage solution. With a number of enhancements designed to improve performance, ease-of-use and security, the new release of Virtuozzo accelerates application workloads and simplifies deployments with centralized management and new automation tools. The Virtuozzo platform optimizes infrastructure costs with a pure software solution that combines breakthrough performance with the freedom to use any x86 server-based architecture - or opt for dedicated bare metal servers from the cloud. 

Release highlights:

• Reduce storage costs with RAID 6 erasure coding performance improvements - The latest Virtuozzo release improves the performance of data located on Virtouzzo Storage in erasure code mode, which provides added data protection and enables more efficient use of disk space. This allows customers to run virtualization and database workloads up to 130% faster, as well as run more workloads per host to reduce hardware footprints and lower total cost of ownership. Virtuozzo Storage also provides customers with flexibility depending on the workload or type of storage needed, including support for container and virtual machine (VM) volume storage using erasure coding mode, or support for more demanding workloads, including advanced cloud services and databases, using replicas.
  

• Deploy and manage containers, VMs and storage from a single solution - Customers can now manage compute and storage for hyperconverged infrastructure deployments together with the Virtuozzo Automator and Virtuozzo Storage management panels available in a single solution. This makes installations and management easier and faster, while giving customers more control over their deployments to optimize costs and server capacity.
  

• Perform hypervisor security updates with no downtime - With this release, Virtuozzo enables the installation of hypervisor updates without the need to restart the virtual machine. This improvement allows customers to avoid service interruptions to end users, while keeping hypervisors secure and saving IT departments countless hours on maintenance and updates. Virtuozzo also includes ReadyKernel, which provides similar benefits for Linux kernel updates for containers.
  

• Run Microsoft Windows VMs in Virtuozzo deployments - VMs running Microsoft Windows will now work in Virtuozzo deployments without the need to install Microsoft disk drivers inside the VM, using newly added Hyper-V paravirt storage device emulation. This new functionality is the result of community work that Virtuozzo has been doing with KVM/QEMU, and greatly simplifies the installation of VMs running Microsoft Windows into Virtuozzo environments.
  

• Enable automated updates of guest tools in VMs - Virtuozzo now enables automated updates for guest tools to ensure that VMs are properly configured with every new update.
  

"Our latest release of Virtuozzo makes it easier for our customers to deploy and manage a hyperconverged infrastructure with integrated compute and storage in a single solution," said George Karidis, Chief Executive Officer at Virtuozzo. "With Virtuozzo, companies can run existing apps with breakthrough performance and efficiency by leveraging containers, VMs and storage, while putting in place a next generation infrastructure for cloud native apps and microservices."

Additional new features include new upgrade options for backup and restore of Virtuozzo 6 virtual machines and containers to Virtuozzo 7 nodes, and automated disk compacting for Linux VMs to minimize disk usage.

More information on the Virtuozzo platform is available here.