At Boston Limited, we get hands-on with the latest technology, working alongside top vendors to deliver powerful, real-world solutions. In this article, we’re taking a closer look at Virtuozzo’s Hybrid Infrastructure and how it can transform your IT environment.
Originally founded as SWsoft in 1997 (later rebranded as Parallels in 2008), Virtuozzo emerged in 2001 as a pioneer in commercially viable container technology, shaping the way virtual machines and containers operate today. Spun off as an independent company in 2015, Virtuozzo offers a comprehensive suite of solutions, including container and virtual machine management, optimised resource allocation, seamless scalability (including storage) and built-in backup, disaster recovery and high availability. Designed to handle a wide range of workloads, Virtuozzo provides both cloud hosting and on-site support, making it an ideal choice for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and enterprises looking to build robust cloud infrastructures.
Hosted on customer hardware, the Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure an easy-to-use interface based on OpenStack, allowing for fast deployments across all nodes in the environment. By having complete control over the hypervisor itself, enterprise IT teams can create the exact environment they require with unparallelled precision.
The GUI is broken into smaller categories to avoid user overload. They include:
The dashboard shows the storage metrics that can be changed from 1 hour up to 7 days. The information displayed shows the reads and writes of storage in use within the environment as well as the chunks usage. It also shows the physical space available in addition to the logical space, giving a breakdown of where the storage is being used. Finally, the Services tab shows all the Chunk Services (CS) and Meta Data Storage (MDS) that is active and/or failed.
Virtuozzo dashboard overview showing generic system resource usage
There is also a built-in Grafana tab. This has a multitude of graphs and options for a much more in-depth overview of the entire environment giving a much broader option to find what is required.
The more in-depth Grafana dashboard built-into Virtuozzo
The Alerts tab shows any possible issues with the cluster, be it from warnings from possible incorrect settings to outright critical failures. This will always flag on the side panel as these detections can cause system instability, operational issues or worst-case cease functionality of the environment.
Any main issues within the environment are displayed in the Alerts tab
The Audit Log is a complete overview of activities within the environment. Any changes will be stored here, from a user logging in, a change in an IP address to a deletion of a VM, it can all be viewed from here.
Infrastructure logs will be displayed in the GUI here, along with the option to download the full logs
Under the Compute tab there is the Overview, which gives information regarding what VMs and resources are being used or are free. It covers any reserved vCPU resources, RAM and provisioned storage. It also has the status of any VMs that are in the cluster, a list of the most resource intensive VMs and any alerts regarding any issues they may have.
Overview with pies, graphs and lists showing the current and free resources in the infrastructure
The Nodes panel shows what current systems have been configured to be used as part of the Compute cluster within the environment. These will house any containers or virtual machines users will create and use. Redundancy is selected during cluster creation and depending on how many nodes will be in the cluster will result in the type of redundancy offered.
Any nodes that have been assigned to the Virtuozzo environment for use will be shown here
This area of the GUI has several tabs worth of note. Firstly, the Virtual Machines tab, here is where users create their VMs and shows what is currently in use, what resources have been assigned and which node in the cluster they are being stored on.
Any virtual machines created will be listed here
The next tab is for Images. Images are ISOs that are stored in the environment for use with Virtual Machines which usually contain operating systems (OS). Further ISOs can be uploaded by the “Add image” button.
All images and ISOs within Virtuozzo will be listed in this tab
The Flavors tab defines the resource allocations for virtual machines (VMs) at the time of creation. It offers several preset configurations to quickly deploy VMs, along with the option to customise resource allocations by creating new presets using the Create Flavor button.
Any VM resource allocation profiles are stored and created here
Finally, the SSH Keys tab allows you to upload unique keys to allow Secure Shell (SSH) connections to VMs. Once attached to a VM, direct connections without the need of the Virtuozzo GUI or other VDIs can be achieved.
This part of the interface has most of the essential network settings. By default, there are only “public” and “private” networks, but more can be created for full customisation with the “Create network” button. This will give users the option to have multiple networks for how they want their infrastructure to be built.