VzLinux, another distro that promises to be the ideal replacement for CentOS

The company Virtuozzo (formerly a division of Parallels), which develops server virtualization software based on open source projects, announced a few days ago the start of a new distribution from Linux, called "VzLinux", which had previously been used as a base operating system developed by the virtualization platform and a variety of commercial products.

From now on, VzLinux is available to everyone and is positioned as a replacement for CentOS 8, ready for production deployments.

Virtuozzo has a long history sponsoring and contributing to open source projects recognized as OpenVZ, KVM, Docker, OpenStack, CRIU. The company's reliance on its VzLinux distribution has led to an internal conversion of more than 200 CentOS servers, ensuring that Virtuozzo's infrastructure is future-proof well beyond December 2021, when CentOS is scheduled to end. of its useful life.

It is a pioneer in the sector, who developed the first container technology available on the market for 21 years. The company provides software solutions and services to more than 450 service providers, FLIs and enterprises around the world to create more than 500.000 virtual environments, running critical workloads in the cloud.

About VzLinux

It is highlighted that VzLinux is available without restrictions, it is free and from now on it will be developed as an open source project, developed with the participation of the community. The distribution will have a long maintenance cycle, corresponding to the update release cycle for RHEL 8.

The proposed installation image is designed to be installed on conventional hardware, but in the future it is mentioned that Two additional editions optimized for use in containers and virtual machines are planned to be released.

At the same time, the current build already includes plugins for efficient work under the control of Virtuozzo, OpenVZ and KVM hypervisors, as well as templates for deployment to AWS, Azure and GCP cloud systems.

"The enterprise Linux distribution market is moving away from CentOS-dominated Linux servers given the distribution's scheduled sunset later this year," said Maik Broemme, Senior Product Manager at Virtuozzo. “The resulting gap in the market requires a reliable solution with longevity, which is why we opted to make our VzLinux publicly available. Our goal is simply to provide the industry with a free, viable alternative with seamless transition capabilities. ”

For a quick transfer to VzLinux of existing solutions using CentOS 8, a special utility is provided that supports migration of virtual machines and systems installed on basic hardware. Virtuozzo also provides additional functionality to provide snapshots to revert changes in case of migration problems and automate server group transfers.

In the future, it is planned to provide a utility to migrate from CentOS 7, add an agent for Acronis backup systems, and start shipping a Virtuozzo Linux Enterprise Edition build with commercial support and live patches that allow you to update the kernel without rebooting. Next year it is planned to additionally launch the commercial edition of Hoster Edition for use in hosting systems.

Download and get VzLinux

For those who are interested in being able to obtain from VzLinux, they should know that the new version 8.3-7 is offered for download and also the source code to rebuild the distribution together with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 packages.

The builds offered are prepared for the x86_64 architecture and come in two versions: full (4.2G) and compact (1.5G). The system images for OpenStack and Docker have been prepared separately. VzLinux is RHEL compliant fully binary and can be used to seamlessly replace RHEL 8 and CentOS 8 based solutions.

Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it about this new Linux distribution, you can check the details In the following link.


Be the first to comment

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked with *

*

*

  1. Responsible for the data: Miguel Ángel Gatón
  2. Purpose of the data: Control SPAM, comment management.
  3. Legitimation: Your consent
  4. Communication of the data: The data will not be communicated to third parties except by legal obligation.
  5. Data storage: Database hosted by Occentus Networks (EU)
  6. Rights: At any time you can limit, recover and delete your information.