Virtuozzo moves to open source development model

We at Parallels Odin * business unit have been developing virtualization technologies since 1999 . Over the past 15 years, we have turned the concept into a platform for hypervisor and container virtualization Virtuozzo . All this time, in parallel with the commercial product, the open project OpenVZ was developed, within which components for creating and managing containers were developed, and the source code was available under the GPL license. And, despite the fact that the project was losing heavily to a commercial product in terms of functionality and performance, an active and open user community formed around it.

We were often asked why the development process is closed and why the company is so unfriendly to the contributors. Taking into account these requests and the interest in our technologies from the community, we open part of the components of Virtuozzo , providing access to the source code of these components, and open the development process. This will allow anyone interested in our technology to freely use our work and take part in the development of a new version of Virtuozzo.


The second important problem that we solve by making the development open and combining code bases is the compatibility of the open and commercial versions of the product. Often, our potential buyers first looked at an open project, and even launched commercial services on it. However, when they decided to switch to the commercial version, they were faced with the fact that updating from OpenVZ to Virtuozzo was inconvenient, and sometimes switching to it was even more difficult than from other commercial virtualization solutions.
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Now openVZ users will get the opportunity to easily upgrade to the commercial version (which would have previously required a separate Virtuozzo product), plus a well-tested code and additional features and functions, including technical support.

Now for the details. The repository with the source code of the Linux kernel version 3.10 is open to anyone , and you can either passively monitor the work on the kernel or join the development. The documentation describing the rules for accepting patches is in the form of design, but in general we will adhere to generally accepted rules for developing the Linux kernel, so follow the coding standards and rules for accepting patches accepted in the community. The development process is conducted in the mailing list devel@openvz.org , to which anyone can subscribe.

Important note - the kernel is under development, it is not ready for industrial use, and compatibility issues with older versions are possible. For example, one of the significant time constraints is the lack of compatibility of the kernel with the old version of the utility for managing vzctl containers, due to a change in the API for managing containers. The source code for the new version of the vzctl utility, compatible with the kernel 3.10, we will also publish, but a little later.

The next step we will take is to open the source code of user utilities for working with containers, creating templates, etc. Follow the news about the project in social networks .



* Since March 2015, the Parallels business unit, which is engaged in service provider products and server virtualization solutions, has been operating under a new brand, Odin.