SSDNodes ssdnodes.com Virtuozzo 7 Preview Specials

eva2000 · May 27, 2017

SSDnodes.com has preview special pricing for their new Virtuozzo 7 nodes Get 8GB RAM and Docker support at $5.49/mo for life!

eva2000 · May 27, 2017

not sure if Centmin Mod would support or work with Virtuozzo 7 if TCP level tuning isn't supported like OpenVZ ? as Centmin Mod can detect OpenVZ systems and skip certain install routines. I would have to figure out how to detect Virtuozzo 7 systems as such. Though Virtuozzo 7 uses KVM so should should TCP level tunning anyway.

Some older Virtuozzo 7 Beta impressions at OpenVZ / Virtuozzo 7 Beta First Impressions | MontanaLinux.org

Odin and the OpenVZ Project announced the beta release of a new version of Virtuozzo today. This is also the next version of OpenVZ as the two are merging closer together. See their release announcement.

There will eventually be two distinct versions... a free version and a commercial version. So far as I can tell they currently call it Virtuozzo 7 but in a comparison wiki page they use the column names Virtuozzo 7 OpenVZ (V7O) and Virtuozzo 7 Commercial (V7C). The original OpenVZ, which is still considered the stable OpenVZ release at this time based on the EL6-based OpenVZ kernel, appears to be called OpenVZ Legacy.
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from Comparison

eva2000 · May 27, 2017

2. What’s New

What’s New
The key changes in Virtuozzo 7 are:

Virtuozzo 7 is based on RHEL 7 and Kernel 3.10+.

Virtuozzo 7 uses the KVM/QEMU hypervisor and enables customers to manage virtual machines via the libvirt API and VirtManager.

Containers use cgroups and namespaces that limit, account for, and isolate resource usage as isolated namespaces of a collection of processes. The beancounters interface remains in place for backward compatibility. At the same time, it acts as a proxy for actual cgroups and namespaces implementation.

UUIDs are used to identify both virtual machines and containers. With containers, prlctltreats the former VEID parameter as name.

VCMMD, the fourth-generation unified memory manager, and vcmmd, a single daemon for managing memory of both virtual machines and containers. Virtuozzo 7 uses memcg. Balancing and configuring memcg limits enables getting the exact overcommit, shadow gangs, swap, page cache overuse Virtuozzo parameters.

Virtual machine HDD images are stored in the QCOW2 format.

Backups are stored now in QCOW2 format.

ReadyKernel (starting from Virtuozzo 7.0 RTM Hotfix 1 and kernel 3.10.0-327.18.2.vz7.15.2). ReadyKernel is a new way of applying kernel updates without the need to reboot the physical server. For comparison, the previous versions of Virtuozzo support rebootless kernel upgrade that delivers a complete new kernel to the server, freezes all running instances, and tries to swap the kernel. Whike simple, this approach has a significant drawback of having to freeze running containers for a couple of minutes. In turn, ReadyKernel is based on a new upstream technology called kpatch. It does not require freezing running processes as it swaps calls one by one using ftrace. The overall patching process may take longer but end users would see no downtime. In addition, each ReadyKernel update is prepared and tested by kernel engineers.

Container live migration via CRIU. In the previous versions of Virtuozzo, most operations performed during migration were done in the kernel space. As a result, the migration process imposed a lot of restrictions. Transfers of running instances were only possible between similar servers with the same kernel version. Any errors during the process could lead to a kernel and physical server crash. To improve upon migration, Virtuozzo launched a new project aiming to move most of the migration code to the user space, make the migration process reliable, and remove excessive restrictions. CRIU (which stands for Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace) became a huge success and is being widely adopted by the open-source community as well as commercial companies. As of today, the most active contributors to the project are engineers working at Ubuntu, Google, and Docker.

Libvirt support. Libvirt is an open-source API, daemon, and management tool for managing virtualization platforms. The API is widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors for cloud-based solutions. Virtuozzo considers libvirt as a standard API for managing both virtual machines and containers. For demonstration or proof-of-concept purposes, you can use the Virtual Machine Manager to manage Virtuozzo hosts.

Any backup (full or incremental) can now be deleted from the backup chain.

Virtuozzo provides guest tools for virtual machines that currently allow the following: to execute commands in VMs from the host, to set user passwords, to set and obtain network settings, to change SIDs, to enter VMs.

Automatic memory management (technical preview). Virtuozzo 7 features a technical preview of automatic memory management for virtual machines and containers. In older versions of Virtuozzo, overcommitted memory was reclaimed by means of swapping. Now several policies for the vcmmd daemon are available, enabling optimized balancing of VM and container memory in various environments. The policies involve the use of cgroups limits, swap, ballooning for virtual machines, and kernel same-page merging.

Memory guarantees. A memory guarantee is a percentage of container or virtual machine’s RAM that said container or VM is guaranteed to have. For virtual machines, the memory guarantee value is set to 80% by default; For containers, the default memory guarantee value is 0%. To change the default value, use the new prlctl set --memguarantee command.

Memory hotplugging. The new and improved memory hotplugging techique allows both increasing and reducing virtual machine RAM size on the fly, without the need to reboot the VM. Configured by the command prlctl --mem-hotplug, memory hotplugging is implemented as a combination of ballooning and addition of virtual DIMM slots. When a command to increase VM memory size is run, the memory is first expanded by deflating the VM’s balloon. If fully deflating the balloon is not enough to get the requested memory size, virtual DIMM slots are added. When a command to reduce VM memory size is run, the memory is shrunk by inflating the VM’s balloon. This feature is disabled by default and only supported for virtual machines with at least 1GB of RAM.

Kernel same-page merging. To optimize memory usage by virtual machines, Virtuozzo uses a feature of Linux called Kernel Same-Page Merging (KSM). The KSM daemon ksmd periodically scans memory for pages with identical content and merges those into a single page. Said page is marked as copy-on-write (COW), so when its contents are changed by a virtual machine, the kernel creates a new copy for that virtual machine. KSM enables the host to: avoid swapping due to merging of identical pages, run more virtual machines, overcommit virtual machine memory, and speed up RAM and hence certain applications and guest operating systems.

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eva2000 · May 27, 2017

3. Known Issues and Restrictions

Known Issues and Restrictions

ploops over NFS are not supported. (PSBM-20108)

In-place upgrading from Virtuozzo 6 to Virtuozzo 7 is available for nodes with containers only. (PSBM-29221)

In Windows VMs, each new SCSI HDD may be added as offline. As a workaround, you can either bring each disk back online manually. Alternatively, before the first boot with a new disk, run san policy=onlineall in DISKPART to set the SAN policy to OnlineAll. (PSBM-41663)

Secondary SCSI disks can be offline after v2v migration from Virtuozzo 6 to Virtuozzo 7. As a workaround, each disk can be brought back online manually. Alternatively, before the first boot with a new disk, run san policy=onlineall in DISKPART to set the SAN policy to OnlineAll. (PSBM-48700)

Direct and offset autofs mounts served by automount are in inactive state after container migration. To work around the issue, kill the automount process with SIGKILL signal and restart the automount daemon. (PSBM-49104)

Changes to boot order are only applied after a complete VM shutdown. (PSBM-49119)

Limited simfs support (feature provided as is). Unlike OpenVZ, the simfs layout is based on bindmounts in Virtuozzo 7. When a simfs-based container is started, its private area is bindmounted to the root container area. To create a simfs container: 1) Set VEFSTYPE=simfsin /etc/vz/vz.conf, 2) Run prlctl create <CT_name>. The simfs limitations in Virtuozzo 7 are: 1) No support for first- or second-level quotas, 2) No support for online migration of simfs-based containers. (OVZ-6613)

Virtuozzo 6 OS and application EZ templates are not supported. (PSBM-54009)

Disk hotplugging is not supported in Virtuozzo Storage. (PSBM-57929)

No support for connecting physical floppy and CD/DVD drives to VMs. (PSBM-54477)

Different UUIDs may be reported on host and in VM for a physical iSCSI HDD assigned to VM. VM restart fixes the issue. (PSBM-57700)

Cloning of running virtual machines is not supported.

Live migration of Virtuozzo 6 containers to Virtuozzo 7 servers is not supported. (PSBM-18457)

Virtuozzo 6 Windows VMs without installed Virtuozzo guest tools cannot be migrated to Virtuozzo 7, restored from Virtuozzo 6 or backed up to Virtuozzo 7.

CPU hotplugging is not available and results in crash in virtual machines with Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. (PSBM-62201)

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buik · May 27, 2017

Beware.
The biggest advantage of Virtuozzo is that you can run KVM and OpenVZ - VPS servers simultaneously on the same hosts server.

Much seen consequence: Ailing slow VPS server c.q. overselling the host like monkey crap. I've seen it more often. (In general, No experience with SSDnodes)

eva2000 · May 28, 2017

bassie said: ↑

The biggest advantage of Virtuozzo is that you can run KVM and OpenVZ - VPS servers simultaneously on the same hosts server.
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Ah interesting indeed.. that could be a bad thing though good too - means OpenVZ VPS get to use 3.10 kernels etc.

eva2000 · May 28, 2017

Also SSDNodes touches on what they have planned a last month What's Next for SSD Nodes: KVM and Containers

Enter Virtuozzo
Virtuozzo is the enterprise-level version of OpenVZ—they're based around the same core components, but with significant improvements. Most notably:

A KVM-based hypervisor

Support for both KVM and containers

A 3.10+ Linux kernel

The ability to run Docker and other container technologies!

Storage quality of service (QoS) options to ensure that abusive customer don't negatively affect others

Reboot-less kernel upgrades

On top of that, Virtuozzo enables some other compelling features, such as automated snapshots and integrated backups/restores. There's also more flexible storage options, which allow us to create more unique packages or add-ons for those who require more disk space for their applications.

There's hardware changes, too
Right now, our physical servers are the lifeline for every VPS—if that server goes down, so do all the clients. That's not good.

Instead, Virtuozzo creates a distributed, highly available storage system, where the disks are separated from CPU/RAM servers. If a disk fails, it can be swapped out easily with no downtime. Even if an entire disk server fails, the load is dynamically spread across the other servers until we can get things back up and running again. If a CPU/RAM server goes down, those customers will get automatically rebooted on another. We pride ourselves on our availability, but this is yet another step in the right direction.

On top of that, Virtuozzo will make our hardware operations more efficient. Right now, we operate best when we our storage, CPU, and RAM are all equally utilized, but that's rarely the case. Our Montreal location runs out of RAM first, while in Dallas, storage gets eaten up, leaving underutilized RAM. By splitting CPU/RAM and storage into separate clusters, we can add only a CPU/RAM server when that's running low, or only a storage server when we need a few more TB to offer up.

These changes are going to make our operations more efficient, at higher availability, even as we offer more features to our customers. So, for us, this is an exciting next step in growing SSD Nodes to new heights.

Stay tuned for more details—we'll be sure you don't miss the official launch in just a short time.
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