Virtuozzo for Enterprise
Virtuozzo brings commodity operating systems such as Linux up to carrier-grade levels of security and availability, resulting in increased services levels for an IT organization while at the same time taking advantage of the low costs, open architecture, and ubiquity that Linux and Intel-based servers are known for. The combination of an open server OS, Intel and Virtuozzo will enable dramatic Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reductions in your organization and enable more services. Virtuozzo can be used for:
Transparent Server Consolidation
Enterprises are constantly faced with the dilemma of ever-changing IT requirements: increased TCO due to a failure to design-in IT growth, greater fragmentation of data and applications resulting in higher complexity and costs and rising operational costs due to service outages and slowdowns that result in decreased customer satisfaction.
IT managers seeking to improve the efficiency, flexibility and service levels of their organization are turning to “server consolidation”,
IT managers can immediately begin a server consolidation project with no modification of existing applications and no retraining of staff. Virtuozzo runs all standard Linux and BSD applications with zero changes required. Many inhouse applications developed on Windows or UNIX platforms will run with minimal modifications if written on application servers such as BEA Weblogic, Oracle IAS or IBM Websphere. SQL databases, web sites, mail, file/print can also be moved to Virtuozzo VEs with little effort.
Security
Virtuozzo VEs can run a single application per operating system environment. If a security breach is encountered, the threat will be isolated to a single VE, leaving the integrity of the rest of the server and organization intact.
The IT administrator can delegate authority to departmental network administrators for selected services without comprising the security of the global network.
Security updates for the operating system and all applications can be applied in single procedure, increasing the probability of that all known security holes are filled.
Example
A security hole in Sendmail is exploited by a hacker. The hacker is fully isolated in a VE with no tools and no other network traffic going through the VE.
Development Environment
Developers have a secure and isolated build environment with access to multiple versions of an OS. For example, Red Hat 7.1, 7.3, SuSE, Caldera, Turbolinux can all exist on the same server. System libraries in VEs can be different. Fair-sharing of system resources usually allows rapid builds on powerful machines shared by other developers. Resource limits per VE prevents bugs from crashing a server due to memory leaks or race conditions. Developers can test clusters or farms of VEs instead of racks of test servers. Full virtualization of the file system and network layer enables transparent access to devices. Development environment of virtually any configuration can be rapidly deployed, cloned, destroyed in a metter of seconds. Existing hardware can be dynamically partitioned.
Availability
Virtuozzo’s automated VE migration features dramatically reduce system downtime due to planned system maintenance. In the case of a hardware upgrade, the IT administrator simply provisions another server and moves the VEs to another server. There are only a few seconds of downtime during the migration.
If the IT administrator needs to upgrade system libraries to support an application with special requirements, only one application will be affected. For example, mail, database, web, and custom applications can all be run in their own VE on the same server.
| 
