Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software provider Virtuozzo updated its software stack, adding a function that enables virtual machines (VMs) running Microsoft Windows to work in Virtuozzo deployments.

The updates added Hyper-V paravirt storage device emulation. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s native hypervisor, which can create VMs on x86-64 systems running Windows. Adding this means Virtuozzo deployments will run Microsoft Windows without the need to install Microsoft disk drivers inside the VM.

The new features are based on customer demand, and “in some cases we’re predicting where the customers will be in six months,” said George Karidis, Virtuozzo CEO. “The Microsoft Windows piece is customer demand.”

The release also includes RAID 6 erasure coding performance improvements.

RAID 6 is a common form of erasure coding, which is a method of data protection. These RAID 6 improvements provide additional data protection and improve disk space efficiency. This allows customers to run virtualization and database workloads up to 130 percent faster, as well as run more workloads per host, the company said.

“The improvements we’ve put in around RAID 6 that allow for better performance, better density of your storage, is probably the biggest added feature in this release,” Karidis said.

The update also allows customers to:

  • Deploy and manage containers, VMs, and storage from a single platform, which combined the company's automator and storage management panels.
  • Install hypervisor updates without restarting the virtual machine, meaning no downtime. Virtuozzo also includes ReadyKernel, which provides similar benefits for Linux kernel updates for containers.

Additionally, the new release enables automated updates for guest tools in VMs.

Virtuozzo integrates compute and storage, which Karidis said “really is key to the future around the hyperconverged stack.”

Its HCI platform supports containers, KVM-based VMs, and software-defined storage. The software runs on any x86 server-based architecture as well as bare metal servers.

Last month the company announced a new partnership with cloud infrastructure provider Packet.