Why did we open the code Virtuozzo

“In total” 16 years ago we developed the first concept of container virtualization technology, which later became a world-class server product. In 2005, the OpenVZ project was launched, within the framework of which an open version of a commercial product was developed. Despite the fact that OpenVZ is inferior to a commercial product in terms of functionality, this solution is often used both in the hosting market and in small projects that require lightweight virtualization. Now containers are becoming much more popular: if before the only area of ​​their use was hosting (and this segment was captured by 90%), today they are increasingly used in the corporate market - from software development to industrial systems (OpenVZ is used in Pixar, Atlassian, Yandex and others. ). Interested in them are the "big" guys - Google, IBM, Facebook and so on. In principle, this is part of the answer to the question “Why did we combine the code bases of commercial and open projects, and announced the open development of OpenVZ ?”, But under the cut we would like to tell more in detail why this was done.

Since during the creation of our products, as far as possible, we give all our work to the main core (upstream) , most of the code for the functionality of containers in the modern Linux kernel was written either by our employees or based on patches and ideas proposed by our employees.
Taking into account (see above) the growing popularity of container technology, we announced two major changes in development:

• Combining source code components OpenVZ and Virtuozzo , and their transformation into a single distribution
• Transfer the development process to the OpenVZ community to the maximum extent to allow everyone to participate in it.

The purpose of these changes is to make an open platform for building virtualization solutions, and, above all, container virtualization. Now everyone who already uses an open or commercial version of the solution can solve their problems using an open product that develops in accordance with the needs of users.

From the point of view of users, there will be one distribution kit - Virtuozzo, which will provide all the possibilities of container and hypervisor virtualization without restrictions. For paid users will be available additional functionality that can be installed as a set of packages. That is, reinstalling or upgrading one product to another is not required.
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Such changes will provide more benefits to users of both the open and closed versions:

• For users of the open version, functionality that was previously only available to commercial users will be available. In the future, most of the functions that we develop, and 100% of the functions that come from the OpenVZ community, will be in the open part.
• From the developer’s point of view, the APIs of both versions will be identical (of course, the commercial version may have additional APIs for enhanced functionality). API compatibility is one of our priorities; it is necessary to build an ecosystem - the time of isolated products is long past.
• For our commercial users, we will focus not only and not so much on an expanded set of functionality, but rather on turning a commercial product from a virtualization platform into a full-fledged solution for service and cloud providers, at the expense of additional services. There are already such services (including a storage solution that can integrate with Virtuozzo), and in the future there will only be more.
• With the opening of the source code of the product and the development process, users have the opportunity to make changes to the product independently. You can independently implement the technologies that can improve your business.

You can join the development of OpenVZ , and in the comments ask questions and express all that you think about it. We also constantly report on project news in social networks .

Last week, we launched a survey for OpenVZ users to better understand how people use OpenVZ containers, what pros and cons they see in this virtualization solution. If you are using the project's work, then you can answer the questions here .

The article was written in collaboration with Andrei Moruga .