Virtuozzo (a former division of Parallels), an open source virtualization server software company, has begun public distribution of the VzLinux distribution, which was previously used as the base operating system for the company's virtualization platform and various commercial products. From now on, VzLinux has become available to everyone and is positioned as a replacement for CentOS 8, ready for production implementations.
The VzLinux 8.3-7 release is offered for download, built by rebuilding the sources of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 packages. The assemblies are prepared for the x86_64 architecture and come in two versions - full (4.2G) and compact (1.5G). Separately prepared system images for OpenStack and Docker. VzLinux is fully binary compatible with RHEL and can be used as a transparent replacement for RHEL 8 and CentOS 8 based solutions.
It is emphasized that VzLinux is supplied without restrictions, free of charge and will henceforth be developed as an open project, developed with the participation of the community. The distribution will have a long maintenance cycle that matches the release cycle for RHEL 8.
The proposed installation image is designed to be installed on top of conventional hardware, but two additional editions are planned to be published in the future, optimized for use in containers and in virtual machines. Therefore, the current build already includes add-ons for efficient work under the control of Virtuozzo, OpenVZ and KVM hypervisors, as well as templates for deployment in cloud systems AWS, Azure and GCP.
For a quick transition to VzLinux of existing solutions that use CentOS 8, a special utility is provided that supports the migration of both virtual machines and systems installed on bare hardware. Virtuozzo also provides additional functionality to create snapshots to rollback changes in case of problems during migration and to automate the translation of server groups.
In the future, it is planned to provide a utility for moving from CentOS 7, add an agent for Acronis backup systems, and start shipping a Virtuozzo Linux Enterprise Edition build, which is distinguished by commercial support and delivery of Live patches that allow updating the kernel without rebooting. Next year, we plan to additionally release a commercial edition of Hoster Edition for use in hosting systems.
As alternatives to the classic CentOS 8, in addition to VzLinux, AlmaLinux (developed by CloudLinux, together with the community), Rocky Linux (developed by the community under the guidance of the founder of CentOS with the support of a specially created company Ctrl IQ) and Oracle Linux are also positioned. In addition, Red Hat has made RHEL available free of charge to open source organizations and individual developer environments of up to 16 virtual or physical systems.
Source: opennet.ru