[Users] Latest changes in Virtuozzo 7 development 20151222

[Sergey Bronnikov]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to share with you news on the latest changes in Virtuozzo 7 development.

The most important new is publishing of final version of Virtuozzo 7 Beta 2.

The key changes available in this Technical Preview are:
- Virtuozzo 7 is based on RHEL 7 and Kernel 3.10+;
- Virtuozzo 7 uses the KVM/QEMU hypervisor;
- Containers use cgroups and namespaces that limit, account for, and isolate
resource usage as isolated namespaces of a collection of processes;
- UUIDs are used to identify both virtual machines and containers;
- VCMM 4th generation of memory manager. Virtuozzo 7 uses memcg;
- Virtuozzo provides guest tools for virtual machines that currently allow
executing commands in VMs from the host, set user passwords, and set and obtain
network settings;

Read more details in Release notes [1].

We have started to make available Virtuozzo features and developer tasks in
public OpenVZ Jira. The most interesting public available features planned for
next versions of Virtuozzo are:

- Mosaic - it should bring multistorage support in Vz7 (OVZ-6620, OVZ-6617)
- SimFS support in RHEL7 kernel (OVZ-6581, OVZ-6613)
- Rebase vzkernel to the RHEL 7.2 kernel (OVZ-6630)

With public available features and tasks it is more convenient to track
Virtuozzo development - just use appropriate dashboard in Jira:
- Beta 2 [2]
- Beta 3 [3]
- Beta 4 [4]

In latest test builds of Virtuozzo 7 there were added some new functionality:
- virt-manager package with containers support. The virt-manager application is
a GUI for managing virtual machines through libvirt;
- prl_disk_tool utility to manage disks in Virtuozzo;

Usually our developers send TRD (Test Request Description) for the new
functionality where they explain how to use new features and known limitations;
All TRD's for Virtuozzo features are available on the wiki [5].

There were published source code of some new Virtuozzo components:
- libprlcommon - Virtuozzo common libraries
- prl_nettool - tools for managing network settings in guest os
- libvcmmd - library that provides a convenient API for accessing the Virtuozzo
memory management daemon (vcmmd).
Read more about them in our wiki [6].

There will be a popular event for software developers in Brussels, Belgium on
30-31 January 2016 - FOSDEM conference. OpenVZ team will be there: we will have
an OpenVZ booth and will have some talks about containers in "Containers and
Process isolation" devroom [7].

We would like the community to participate with us in the event. If you live in
Europe, are an OpenVZ user and would like to be a part of our team at the OpenVZ
exhibit -- you are very welcome to join us!

According to latest changes in Parallels company and published announce [8]
OpenVZ project is now sponsored by Virtuozzo company, not by Odin. Actually
nothing changes for OpenVZ project.

This is all news about Virtuozzo development for past month.

Happy New year and Merry christmas!

Links
=====

[1] https://docs.openvz.org/virtuozzo_7_readme.webhelp/_virtuozzo_overview.html
[2] https://bugs.openvz.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=10301
[3] https://bugs.openvz.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=10400
[4] https://bugs.openvz.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=10401
[5] https://openvz.org/QA_TODO_list
[6] https://openvz.org/Category:Sub-projects
[7] https://www.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/track/containers_and_process_isolation/
[8] http://www.odin.com/news/pr/release/article/sale-of-odin-service-automation-platform-to-ingram-micro

Sincerely,
Sergey