Virtuozzo 7 update 6: resources have become more mobile

We continue the cycle of posts dedicated to the release of updates to our platform. Today, we’ll talk about Virtuozzo 7 update 6, which added high-availability features, enhanced live migration capabilities, and added a number of handy and useful features.

Ensuring high availability

Users of the Virtuozzo platform are already familiar with the capabilities of the platform for maintaining high availability of services. This is achieved through flexible configuration of allocated resources, as well as full support for live migration technologies based on our own CRIU OpenSource project. In the event of any problems on the hypervisor, virtual machines or containers can automatically move to other nodes of the cluster, providing load balancing. This approach was made possible through the use of shared data storage. In addition, in the sixth update of VZ7, it became possible to easily assign a category of high availability to any instance, a previously similar procedure required to perform a very non-trivial set of actions.

In addition, in update 6 we changed the behavior of the system when migrating the virtual environment: previously, the home directory of the virtual machine or container was transferred to the datastore (the shared storage directory, all data of which meets the specified accessibility and speed parameters) "by default". As practice has shown, this could lead to trouble. For example, after migration, a VM could get into a slow tier. But starting from version VZ 7.6, when a virtual machine or container is migrated, the virtual environment remains in its “native” datastore.
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Simple connectivity features geo-replication for object storage

One of the key components of the Virtuozzo platform is distributed storage, and with each new version, its core functionality is complemented by new and interesting features. Additional services increase system reliability and simplify life for users. In the sixth update of Virtuozzo 7, support for geo-replication for our S3 object storage was a major innovation for storage. Geo-replication is possible for several remote clusters, and the procedure for setting it up is extremely simple. It is enough to exchange tokens in the control panel of the Virtuozzo Storage geo-remote clusters / data centers. Geo-replication works in active-active mode, so users can work with all data centers simultaneously. The S3 protocol automatically resolves the possible occurrence of collisions. This functionality allows you to use S3 as a simple CDN (Content Delivery Network).





Another important innovation is the ability to define limits for iSCSI Targets. The limit is available for both IOPS and bandwidth. In case of setting both limits, the one that will be reached earlier will work. It is very important that the application of limits occurs on the fly without the need to reconnect the iSCSI initiator. Limits can be configured easily and simply by running the iSCSI Target configuration in the control panel interface of the Virtuozzo Storage. This functionality helps service providers provide iSCSI storage without fear of overuse of resources from certain users.



More notifications

If we added SMNP protocol to the list of informers in the past update, in the newest version of Virtuozzo 7, an e-mail notification about any events and problems also appeared. Now you can configure the transmission of messages about any event, as in an existing monitoring system based on SNMP capabilities and receive personal email notifications about important events. This will allow you to monitor the status of the cluster, even from a mobile device.

And a few more minor improvements.

In addition to the “big” features in release 7.6, there were a number of nice little changes in the spring:

• Especially for corporate users, the ability to forward block devices directly has been added to the system containers of Virtuozzo.
• The kernel has been updated to RHEL7.4 kernel 3.10.0-693.1.1.el7, which significantly expanded the list of supported hardware
• Now you can quickly and easily configure the use of your SSL certificates for the control panel
• Was thoughtful and painstaking work on the bugs

Conclusion

The sixth version of VZ7 becomes the latest update of the system in 2017, but we continue to work on expanding the functionality and improving the quality of the system. Users can already move to the new version today, and all the nuances concerning the fixes and additions in VZ7.6 can be found in the pull requests section.