Virtuozzo

Currently I'm using VMware's GSX Server in house for our server virtualization and consolidation. As nice as it is, it's not possible to backup the VMDK files (virtual machine hard drive) of the virtual machine (VM) without pausing or powering off the VM. The problem with powering off the VM is that you can't start it on another set of hardware if it doesn't have the same CPU. The problem with shutting down the VM is that it takes time to shutdown the VM, copy the VM, then start the VM. This is even complicated, for us, by the fact we have one server that requires a local login and then manually starting a process to handle generating reports for our finance department. To get around this I've been looking at Virtuozzo by SW-Soft. This has a number of pros and cons to VMware. One pro is hot backup of the virtual private server (VPS, there version of a VM). A lower use of hard disk space as the virtualization takes place at the OS level and not the hardware. This means that you only need one version of the OS installed, then all VPS share this install. This is good in the sense that one patch or upgrade does that with all VPS and that you only need one license of Windows to run any number of VPS. The cons so far is some hardware limitations such as the inability, with the current version, to add more then one network card (something to be corrected in version 4.0 I'm told, to be released this summer). It also requires all VPS to run the same version of the OS as the host (called a Hardware Node or HN in Virutozzo) so you can't have dis-similar OS versions on a server. Which one will work better for us? I'm not sure yet, it maybe a hybrid solution between the two of them. I've not yet looked at Microsoft Virtual Server R2, but with the new $0 price tag it's worth considering.