Virtuozzo VzLinux 8 Mature Free Linux Distribution Available to Public

Virtuozzo International GmbH released its VzLinux OS (VzLinux 8) to the general public.

VzLinux – an enterprise distribution – has been used by Virtuozzo as a base OS for the company’s OpenVz virtualization solution and other commercial products as well as a guest OS for more than 20 years.

Web hosting service providers and other end customers deploying the technology gain the benefits of a stable, long-term supported Linux distro maintained by the open-source community.

VzLinux 8 is a free, multi-purpose distro optimized to run in containers, VMs or on bare-metal servers. It is designed to support I/O-intensive, enterprise applications and workloads.

The company currently offers a ready-to-use utility to convert from CentOS 8 without downtime as well as templates for hyperscalers, enabling customers to deploy VzLinux 8 as a guest OS under various hypervisors. The conversion utility enables seamless conversions of CentOS 8 bare-metal servers, VMs and containers, effectively managing risk while minimizing negative business impact. Regarding containers, the firm provides functionality including conversion dry-run, snapshot creation to roll back and unattended mass conversion. Options to convert from CentOS 7 will be made available in a future update.

Notably, VzLinux is a 1:1 binary compatible fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux-specifically RHEL 8.

“The enterprise Linux distribution market is shifting away from CentOS-dominated Linux servers given the distro’s slated sunset later this year,” said Maik Broemme, senior product manager. “The resulting gap in the market requires a reliable solution with longevity, which is why we opted to make our VzLinux publicly available. We simply aim to give the industry a viable, free alternative with seamless transition capabilities.“

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The company has a long history of sponsoring and contributing to well-known open-source projects such as OpenVZ, KVM, Docker, OpenStack, CRIU. The firm‘s confidence in its VzLinux distro has led to an in-house conversion of more than 200+ CentOS servers, ensuring its infrastructure is future-proofed well beyond December 2021 when CentOS is slated for end-of-life.

Resource:
Download VzLinux 8 and for contributions to the VzLinux project