Virtuozzo (company)

Virtuozzo software was developed by SWsoft in 2000. In January 2002, the Virtuozzo 2.0 containers virtualization solution was released. In 2003, SWsoft acquired the makers of Confixx and Plesk web hosting products,[3] and expanded its presence in Germany and Novosibirsk, Russia. In December 2007, after the acquisition of Parallels, Inc., SWsoft company announced its plans to change its name to Parallels and distribute its products under the Parallels brand name.[4]

In December 2015, Virtuozzo spun off and became a standalone company,[5] lead by entrepreneur and former Parallels exec Rob Lovell.[6][1] In May 2016, Virtuozzo announced its intention to join the Open Container Initiative[7] and plans to develop dedicated cloud-based servers as well as a specialized Linux distribution.[8] That same month, Virtuozzo launched the Virtuozzo Application Catalog, which was developed in partnership with Bitnami.[9] Virtuozzo announced a strategic partnership with Jelastic in August 2016 to produce Virtuozzo DevOps, an application orchestration platform aimed at mid to large size companies.[10] The company named George Karidis its CEO in November 2016. Karidis previously headed the cloud business unit at CompuCom.[1]

In April 2017, Virtuozzo partnered with Packet.net to distribute Virtuozzo software through Packet.[11]

In November 2018, Virtuozzo announced the appointment of Mr. Alex Fine as Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Fine, a Masters graduate in Biophysics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT),[12] brought to Virtuozzo a track record of accelerated, hyper-revenue growth from global high-tech organizations including CloudBlue, Ingram Micro Cloud, Odin and Parallels. Fine joined Virtuozzo at a critical time as the company enters the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) marketplace, extending its software portfolio with the highly anticipated Virtuozzo Infrastructure Platform.[13] Fine, who prefers the title of, "Chief Energy Officer" is committed to serving Virtuozzo's existing customers while accelerating new customer acquisition through innovation, an evolving roadmap, and a passion to help optimize how organizations deliver and consume critical business applications.[14]

Through 2019, Fine made key global hires across the Americas, EMEA, & APAC, to re-ignite growth in VPS market and enter HCI market with a new solution targeting Service Providers and SMEs, called Virtuozzo Infrastructure Platform.

Virtuozzo was the first company to monetize container workloads, growing over the last two-decades to nearly five million containers under management. As part of Virtuozzo's continued Container and Virtual Machine market leadership, Virtuozzo is committed to transform the global Virtual Private Server (VPS) market. Projections vary, but Virtuozzo estimates the global VPS market will grow from approximately $1.2B in 2019 to nearly $3B by 2025. Virtuozzo is committed to growing their VPS global market share in 2020 and beyond.

Virtuozzo is helping many of the world's largest hosting and telecom providers adopt a state-of-the-art VPS platform, featuring Virtuozzo's software portfolio, cloud operations, and customized managed services. Key to Virtuozzo's success is enabling Hosting and Telecom providers to re-claim the focus of their core business, maximize VPS profit margins, convert shared-hosting to VPS, and maximize long-term value to their end-customers.

In early 2019, Virtuozzo released a new hyperconverged solution, Virtuozzo Infrastructure Platform, combining Virtuozzo's flagship virtualization and storage technology with virtual networking, easy-to-use management panel, and self-service.[15]

Virtuozzo Infrastructure Platform delivers hyperconvergence of compute, storage and virtual networking in a single stack with unified management and multi-tenancy support to help IT organizations build scalable, high-performance cloud or virtual data center infrastructure on commodity hardware to reduce costs and enable business growth.

Virtuozzo's software portfolio offers a flexible and simplified path for organizations’ multi-cloud journey by extending their existing capabilities while enabling new cloud use cases, offering meaningful innovation to help organizations modernize their infrastructure and make the cloud work for their business needs.

As of December 2019, Virtuozzo has more than four hundred fifty customers worldwide including Service Providers, Cloud Service Providers, Hosting Providers, Managed Services Providers, Telecoms, Enterprises, ISV's, SI's, and VAR's as well as a mature Global Alliance Eco System.[16]

Popular examples of new cloud services enabled by Virtuozzo include Load-Balance-as-a-Service, VPN-as-a-Service, Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS), Database-as-a-Service, File Share-as-a-Service, Desktop-as-a-Service (VDI), Backup and DR-as-a-Service, Cyber Protection-as-a-Service, Blockchain-as-a-Service, Surveillance-as-a-Service,[17] and many more including various use cases with AI, GPU, and pay-as-you-go elastic consumption.

Virtuozzo continues to be a thought leader and contributor to open source projects, including Openvz.org, KVM, OpenStack, CNCF and OCI.

Virtuozzo is an operating system-level server virtualization solution designed to centralize server management and consolidate workloads by reducing the number of physical servers required. Organizations use Virtuozzo for server consolidation, disaster recovery, and server workload agility. Virtuozzo does not generate a virtual machine on a host OS like traditional VM software, but instead, it creates isolated virtual private servers (VPSs) on a single physical server. For instance, the software can run multiple Linux VPSs, but not Linux and Windows at the same time on the same server. Each VPS performs exactly like a stand-alone server and can be rebooted independently.[18] Virtuozzo 7 remains Virtuozzo's virtualization offering that includes system containers, KVM-based hypervisor, and software-defined storage, the modern version of Virtuozzo's flagship high-density virtualization technology used for infrastructure optimization that we are historically known for bare-metal performance and is typically used to support hosted VPS offerings.

Virtuozzo Infrastructure Platform is built with high-performance compute, virtual networking, software-defined storage, and a single management interface, which is appealing to both service providers AND enterprises that are looking to enable various types of cloud offerings, either hosted or on-premises. Designed to address the most demanding use cases for cloud services on the market, it combines five main components: High-Performance Compute, Software-Defined Storage, Software-Defined Networking, Management with advanced monitoring, Multi-tenancy architecture and a Self-Service portal, all integrated into a 100% software solution. Common use cases include Big Data environments, Media workflows and Files, Cloud-native applications, Business-critical applications, and Test /Dev environments (Self-service, Snapshots, Virtual networks, Kubernetes and etc.).

Combined, Virtuozzo provides hyperconverged infrastructure, container virtualization, and software-defined storage solutions that lead to better performance, agility, and cost efficiency for service providers and enterprise data centers around the world.[19]

Virtuozzo for Linux became available in 2001 while a version that supports 32- and 64-bit microprocessors became available in 2005.[20][18] In 2002, Virtuozzo proved that the 2.5 version of its software could run 2,500 instances of Red Hat Linux on an eight-processor Dell server. As a result, Intel partnered with Virtuozzo in 2002 to develop a partitioning technology for IA-64 processors.[21]

Linux architectures that support Virtuozzo for Linux are x86, ia64, AMD64, EM64T, and Itanium. Virtuozzo for Linux enables multiple Linux distributions to exist simultaneously on one server.[22] It is based on OpenVZ, a Linux-based OS-level virtualization technology, which allows a physical server to run multiple isolated operating system instances. In 2005, the company updated Virtuozzo to support 64-bit x86 processors.[23] Virtuozzo requires at least a Pentium III server with at least 1 GB of memory and 4 GB available hard drive. Virtuozzo's management tools will be compatible with Microsoft's Viridian and Virtual Server software. Virtuozzo's container staging is processed through the company's container platform OpenVZ.[7][24] Virtuozzo 7, which incorporated an optimized Kernel-based Virtual Machine, was released in July 2016.[25]