Pre-built Ubuntu Virtual Machines from OpenVZ and Ubuntu

OpenVZ and Ubuntu developers will release pre-built Ubuntu virtual machines, that will allow system administrators to deploy a specialized Ubuntu system in approximately one minute.

OpenVZ is an operating system-level virtualisation technology, resulting that both host and guest systems must be Linux. This so-called limitation actually brings a performance advantage over virtual machines or paravirt technologies. It has a modified Linux kernel that provides virtualization, isolation, resource management and checkpointing. The first two features – virtualization and isolation – make each Virtual Environment (VE) to act as a separate entity, behaving like a normal, physical server would.

The resource management is made up of three components: two-level disk quota, fair CPU scheduler and user beancounters. The resources can be modified during VE runtime, eliminating the need to reboot.

The checkpointing and live migration feature was released in April 2006, feature that makes possible moving a VE from one physical server to another, without shutting down the VE. The checkpointing is done by "freezing" the VE and saving its whole state on a file on disk. Then, this file can be moved and unfrozen on a different machine.

Parallels, known as SWsoft until last month, the sponsoring company of OpenVZ, joined forces with Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, in creating the virtualised templates, based on Ubuntu Gutsy.

OpenVZ users will have the possibility to download and modify the templates. This way, either desktop or server instances can be deployed in a fast manner.

OpenVZ project manager, Kir Kolyshkin, said: "We wanted to give our users a fast, easy way to deploy Ubuntu in a virtualised environment."

In November 2007, the OpenVZ project released an update that combined operating system level virtualization with paravirtualization. This technology allows a person to divide a physical server into paravirtualized servers using Xen and, then, to run OpenVZ instances within those virtual servers.

OpenVZ is also standing at the base of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution offered by Parallels.