OpenVZ Project Releases Software to Support Fedora Core 5; Announces Zero Downtime Server Migration Feature

HERNDON, Va., April 5, 2006 – The OpenVZ project today announced availability of its operating system level server virtualization software for Fedora Core 5, which only recently became available. Also, the industry-exclusive "zero downtime migration" feature will be made available for the OpenVZ software.

Last month, OpenVZ (http://openvz.org) announced its availability on the latest SUSE Linux kernel and the latest Linux kernel 2.6.16.

“We’ve now taken the important step of delivering our OpenVZ software on the major Linux distributions so that many users can see the benefits of our technology,” said Kir Kolyshkin, manager of the OpenVZ project. “Our goal, of course, is to gain adoption as part of the mainstream and other Linux distributions. Delivery of the zero downtime migration functionality as part of OpenVZ brings a capability which no other open source virtualization software offers.”

Open VZ for Fedora Core 5

The OpenVZ kernel for Fedora Core 5 is available for download from http://openvz.org/download/kernel/fc5. In addition, the OpenVZ project is making available Fedora Core 5 templates for virtual environments (previously called Virtual Private Server, or VPS), which enable real-time provisioning of servers and give users full use of Fedora applications. The Fedora Core 5 templates allow for almost instant (in many cases about a minute) provisioning of an OpenVZ virtual environment – giving customers with applications running on Fedora the ability to run those applications on a virtual server, rather than a full server. Templates for Fedora Core 5 are available for download at http://openvz.org/download/templates/.

Zero Downtime Migration

The OpenVZ project announced it will add the industry-exclusive “zero downtime migration” feature that allows IT professionals to move virtual servers between physical servers without end-user disruption or the need for costly storage capacity.

Using the zero downtime migration function captures the state of an existing virtual environment and its contents and migrates it to a new physical server without any interruption in service or availability. The function executes between any two servers on a network, so the capability works for any server and any application. OpenVZ delivers this capability without additional requirements, such as a storage area network (SAN). The zero downtime migration feature will be made available for download later this month.

About the OpenVZ Project

The OpenVZ project freely distributes and offers support to its users, promoting operating system virtualization through a collaborative, community effort.

OpenVZ software comes with user tools that help automate management of virtual servers. OpenVZ creates isolated, secure virtual environments on a single physical server – enabling greater server utilization and superior availability with fewer performance penalties. The virtual servers perform and execute like independent servers with their own memory, configuration files, users and applications. Each can be re-booted independently.

With the power of modern CPUs from both Intel and AMD (including the latest dual-core offerings), hardware is often under utilized. With virtualization technology, the server can effectively be split into many small ones, each running its tasks so that the whole server is utilized more efficiently.

OpenVZ software serves the needs of the community developers, testers, documentation experts, and other technology enthusiasts who wish to participate in and accelerate the technology development process. OpenVZ, supported by SWsoft, is a subset of the Virtuozzo virtualization software product. Also, the OpenVZ project maintains a blog site discussing virtualization technology, which can be accessed here, http://blog.openvz.org.

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