Virtuozzo, a Seattle-based virtualization firm, today released Virtuozzo 7, which incorporates an “optimized” version of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that “gives internet service providers enterprise-level support and a better commercial product than they’d have from the open-source community,” interim CEO Mike Riolo said in an interview.
“It’s a huge thing we’re doing,” he added. “This is a very important release, a few years in the making.”
KVM is a virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel that turns it into a hypervisor. Hypervisors let multiple operating systems share a single hardware host.
“ISPs can now run 60 percent more virtual machines on a single node. That means more revenue for them,” Riolo said.
Virtuozzo combines the hypervisor with containers and storage, according to the company’s website. Hypervisors let ISPs simultaneously run virtual machines and containers on the same server, making efficient use of the hardware, the company said. Storage makes containers more useful by ensuring data persistence.
Virtuozzo plays in the hyper-converged integrated systems (HCIS) market — a term referring to the tight coupling of compute, storage, networking and virtualization to run an a generic server. Gartner has predicted the HCIS market will grow 79 percent to reach nearly $2 billion this year and to almost $5 billion by 2019, Virtuozzo said.
Parallels IP Holding GmbH, of Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in December launched its former Virtuozzo business unit as a standalone company, which it continues to own and control. It was initially led by Rob Lovell, who left the company earlier this month. Riolo, who had served as senior vice president of worldwide sales and alliances, took over the CEO position on an interim basis. A subsidiary of Parallels IP Holding Ltd., called simply Parallels, has offices in Renton, Wash., and for 10 years has offered software to run Windows applications on the Mac, allowing users to switch back and forth between the operating systems without rebooting.
Virtuozzo has about 700 partners — mostly ISPs, but also independent software vendors (ISVs) — who use its products to offer virtual private servers and virtual machines to end-users, Riolo said.