Virtuozzo 7 Update 6: Enhancements of HCI to Compute, Storage and Support

The latest release of Virtuozzo‘s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform is now available.

Virtuozzo 7 Update 6 provides enhancements to both compute and storage that reinforce our commitment to provide our customers with increased simplicity, efficiency and flexibility.

In addition, automatic crash data collection has been added to help improve the speed and efficiency of the software support functionality.

Latest release now features:
• Compute Updates: simplified HA, improved live migration of VMs and containers
• Storage Updates: geo-replication for S3 object storage, limits for iSCSI targets, e-mail notifications on alarms and events of the storage cluster

Compute Enhancements Improve HA
One of the significant capabilities of th HCI platform is HA for containers and VMs . In the event of a node failure, all instances are automatically relaunched on another node. This is made possible by software-defined shared storage provided as one of the platform’s components.

Previously, in order to include hardware node in the list of targets for HA, users had to perform a number of complicated configuration steps on each of the nodes. With the new release, the firm simplified the process, requiring one script execution from the end-user which reduces the chances of mistakes.

In addition, the company changed the default behavior of the solution for live migration of VMs and Virtuozzo Containers. Initially the home directory of the instance was relocated to the data store (shared storage folder in which all the data shares the same parameters of the availability and I/O performance) that is configured as the default one for the target node. Such behavior could potentially lead to a number of problems, e.g. the instance could have been launched with slow -tier storage. With the introduction of Update 6 we change this so that the initial data store is preserved in case of migration.

Enhanced Reliability and Predictability of Storage
One of HCI platform’s components is distributed, software-defined storage and with each update it was introduced improvements in terms of core components and value-added features aimed at improving the reliability and security and improving functionality to make management simple.

One of features in the new release is geo-replication for company’s S3 object storage. With the introduction of this feature, users can be sure that data is secured even in the event of a datacenter outage. Geo-replication is supported for several remote clusters. The geo-replication configuration procedure is easy and is available from the Virtuozzo Storage UI.

The only thing required from the user is to input the token generated by the control panel of the remote cluster:

Another added feature includes the capability to define the limits for iSCSI targets. The limits are available for both IO/s and bandwidth. The limit that hits first will be applied.

The limits configuration is available in the storage cluster control panel:

The latest update also includes e-mail notifications on alarms and events of the storage cluster. The firm hopes that the introduction of this function coupled with the SNMP monitoring is enough even for the most demanding operations professionals.

Support Feature – Automatic Crash Data Collection
The release also features an improvement to the way data is collected in the event of a software crash. Previously, if software crash occurred, customers report the issue to company’s support team and are then often asked to gather data from the crash dump to help resolve the issue. In many cases, the data has been lost or deleted before this can happen, which lengthens the time it takes us to address the issue. With the latest update, in the event of a crash, all data is automatically collected from customer nodes and sent to Virtuozzo’s server so that duplicated crash data can be removed and the support team can begin to resolve the issue and fix bugs more efficiently.

Additional features included in latest update include:
• Virtuozzo System Containers now support ISCSI device pass-through
• New kernel based on 4 kernel 3.10 introduces bugfixes and hardware support
• Configurable SSL certificates for the storage control panel from the UI