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Features and Capabilities
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Virtuozzo Management Console Features
Virtuozzo Management Console General Features
VZMC was created with the idea to simplify system administrator common tasks and allow managing hundreds and thousands of virtual environments and tens hardware nodes as a whole. It allows creating, starting and stopping many virtual environments at once, migrate any number of VEs between nodes, see node current utilization and so on.
- Virtuozzo configuration - allows you modifying Virtuozzo configuration parameters such as whether to limit virtual environments disk usage; whether to use pool of templated private areas to speed up VE creation and pool size; whether to keep track of VE network usage; total network bandwidth for all virtual environments; location of Virtuozzo log files and system directories such as directory where templates reside, directories where VE private areas are created by default and so on.
- VE creation wizards - allow you to create virtual environments suitable for running your applications in several clicks. You can create virtual environments tailored to run such important services as DNS, Web, Database engines or you can fine tune quality of service parameters and save them for future use during VE creation. VZMC allows you to "cut" your hardware node and produce QoS settings based on the size of the "part" you want to cut off.
- VE action scripts modification - Virtuozzo allows you to assign scipts for execution to a given virtual environment specific events, such as VE start. VZMC helps you to create and edit such scripts, providing you with the default script samples setting up important variables.
- Shared VE support - Virtuozzo shared VEs have system directories read-only for VE users including root, giving you the environments where important system packages are strictly controlled by hardware node administrator. VZMC allows you creating shared VEs and takes care of upgrading them and migrating them between nodes.
- Repair VE - if VE is accidentially broken from within virtual environment itself, it is possible to bring it up in repair mode and fix the problems.
- VE mount points setup - VZMC lets you mount block devices such as CD-ROMs or part of hardware node file hierarchy into a virtual environment. If you want mount point to be automatically set up on next VE restart, VZMC will add corresponding commands into the VE action scripts and let you review and edit them.
- Network bandwidth management - you can limit total bandwidth consumed by virtual environments as well as set particular limits for a virtual environment. For any VE you can allow consuming all the bandwidth allocated for Virtuozzo or limit it to a particular figure. It is also possible to have several "network classes" distingushing local and international traffic for example and setting different bandwidth limits for different classes.
- Network traffic accounting - if this feature is turned on you can always check how much data a VE transferred over the network. Both aggregate and network class separated statistics can be displayed for a particular period of time.
- Network classes management - you can specify as many network classes based on IP address ranges as you wish and bind them to all or specified network interfaces. Network accounting and bandwidth management will be automatically reconfigured on the fly.
- VZMC Personal Edition - allows you delegating management of one or several virtual environments to VE owner. VZMC Personal Edition does not allow making changes affecting a hardware node but does allow monitoring, starting, stopping and repairing VEs to which access has been granted.
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Template Management
Templates are important part of Virtuozzo - essentially template is OS or application snapshot used by many VEs. As such creating templates with features you need and upgrading it with latest vendor-supplied patches is a vital part of system administrator job.
- Template creation wizard - helps you to create template out of the packages you need and provides you with the default template post-install script, which you can customize in case of non-standard requirements.
- Cutomizing existing templates - is also quite easy and straightforward. You can modify template scripts to perform post-install configuration tasks, for example to remove some packages from the virtual environments created out of this template or to change settings of the particular package.
- Creating template updates - if vendor of your OS or application publish updates for the software you simply submit your vendor updated packages to VZMC and in a while all your virtual environments are running updated version of the application.
- Running both updated and original applications - sometimes it is desirable to keep a particular version for an application because of compatibility or other requirements. VZMC allows you to revert previously applied template upgrades or not to apply upgrades to given VEs.
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Security
Securing of your Virtuozzo installation is very important since you may have several important applications running on the same hardware in different virtual environments.
- Hardware node firewall configuration - easy to use GUI for disabling unwanted access to your hardware node.
- VE firewall configuration - available in Personal Edition as well. Helps to protect virtual environments from intruders and provide intuitive way of controlling access to a VE from network.
- Prebuilt templates for critical services - VZMC allows creating virtual environments dedicated to run some critical network services, such as Domain Name System. Virtual environment created to run DNS service has predefined firewall rules applied, all unnecessary packages removed and unnecessary services stopped.
- Management node VE support - VZMC is able to setup a virtual environment to run HSPcomplete Management Node and will help you secure this VE by disabling dangerous services and advising on others.
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Logs and Monitoring
Developed logs and monitoring features make tracking problems with your Virtuozzo installation much easier. VZMC offers the following ways to check your virtual environments:
- Alerts - you can set up a special alert event if some condition is reached. For example, VZMC allows you to specify an action to conduct when a particular VE reached its one or several QoS parameters limit. The choice of action is yours - from a popup window on administartor console to sending an email.
- Event log - VZMC allows you to increase log level in case of problems occured and lets you to view the log both in real time and previously reported events. Normally Virtuozzo logs the information when VE was created, started and stopped, however you can set log level to view every command Virtuozzo runs and output produced by the commands. This is invaluable when you troubleshooting VE-related problems.
- VZMC monitor - is able to graphically display as real-time VE information as well as replay history from logs. Monitor can show you all QoS parameters as well as number of other important system counters such as CPU usage, disk and network usage and so on. Monitor remembers what information you are interested in and will automatically start quering the counters you choose at previous invocation.
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| Virtuozzo is licensed per server and per CPU power
Comes with the command line and GUI tools |
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