Virtuozzo: Virtualization Storage Ledger 2026 Scorecard

Part of the Virtualization Storage Ledger (edition 2026-10-16). How the scores work: methodology.

Snapshot

Type: product
Owner: Virtuozzo International GmbH (Schaffhausen, Switzerland; private, about 300 employees per Wikipedia; investors undisclosed); founder Serg Bell is chairman; Kurt Daniel CEO, announced 2026-02-20
Licence: Commercial subscription inside Virtuozzo Infrastructure, priced per core and per TB of logical storage (8.0 press release, 2026-10-15), replacing separate compute and storage SKUs; freemium self-install and a free hosted trial since 7.0 (limits not found); no public list price
Latest release: 7.4.0 (build 7.4.0-66, 2026-07-09) with hotfixes to 7.4.0-108 by 2026-10-13; V/IS 8.0 announced 2026-10-15, availability of the full release not stated
Support lifecycle: A lifecycle policy exists but could not be read; hotfixes shipped in 2026 for 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 in parallel; rolling upgrades from the admin panel
Next milestone: Single kernel and single interface across Virtuozzo products and OS containers inside Infrastructure (announced 2026-02-26, no dates)
Hypervisors: Virtuozzo's own KVM and OpenStack compute natively; iSCSI recommended for VMware vSphere in the 5.0 evaluation guide; no current vSphere, Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, XCP-ng or KubeVirt qualification found (docs.virtuozzo.com)
Tier: Storage inside a VM platform
Archetype: Sharp opportunist in a rebrand year
Evidence grade: C. The advisory index (page date 2026-10-13) and the 7.1 and 5.0 admin and evaluation guides were read from docs.virtuozzo.com, so release builds, redundancy modes and iSCSI export are primary. Newer documentation, the lifecycle policy and the 7.3 blog returned 403 and are search summaries; the 6.3, 7.0, 8.0 and company facts come from press copies. No dated release notes exist for 2015 to 2023, so the early steps are grade C, as are hypervisor interoperability, pricing and the integrator rows.

Scope of the scores: Virtuozzo Storage is sold only as a component of Virtuozzo Infrastructure (renamed with 7.3, announced as V/IS 8.0) and serves the vendor's own KVM and OpenStack hosts; the vendor said on 2026-02-26 that it no longer positions standalone products. iSCSI and NFS export to other hypervisors is documented only in a 5.0 era guide. The hypervisor integration and stack coupling rows reflect this.

Scorecard

Dimension	Score	Direction
Capability today	61.5 / 100	higher is better
Momentum since end of 2022	+5.6 points (2015 to 2022: +10.7)	higher is better
Credibility	14.0 / 25	higher is better
Commercial risk	15.0 / 25	lower is better
Technical lock-in	11.5 / 25	lower is better
Integrator fit	10.5 / 20	higher is better
AI leverage	3.0 / 20	higher is better
Ledger Index	50.3 / 100	balanced weights; see the methodology

Capability by domain, 2015 to today

Scores 0 to 5 against fixed anchors; total is weighted to 100.

Domain (weight)	2015	2019	2022	Today
Data services core (15)	2	3	3	3
Resilience and HA (15)	3	3.5	3.5	4
Performance and protocols (12)	2	3	3	3
Hypervisor integration (12)	2.5	2.5	2.5	2.5
Scale and topology (10)	3	3.5	3.5	3.5
Data protection and DR (10)	2	2	2	3
Security (8)	1.5	1.5	1.5	2
Operations and automation (8)	2.5	3	3	3.5
Hardware and deployment freedom (5)	3	3	3	3
Kubernetes and containers (5)	0	2	2	2.5
Total / 100	45.2	55.9	55.9	61.5

Year by year: 2015: 45.2 · 2016: 45.2 · 2017: 46.0 · 2018: 46.0 · 2019: 55.9 · 2020: 55.9 · 2021: 55.9 · 2022: 55.9 · 2023: 55.9 · 2024: 58.4 · 2025: 61.5 · 2026: 61.5

What moved the score

Year	Domain	Change	Points	Trigger
2017	Operations and automation	2.5 → 3	+0.8	Virtuozzo 7.0 Update 4 (May 2017): web storage panel
2019	Data services core	2 → 3	+3.0	Virtuozzo Infrastructure Platform 2.x (advisory VZA-2019-017): replication or erasure coding chosen per volume and storage tiers (feature year grade C); compression and deduplication not found
2019	Kubernetes and containers	0 → 2	+2.0	Kubernetes service on the platform with volumes on Virtuozzo Storage (year grade C)
2019	Performance and protocols	2 → 3	+2.4	Virtuozzo Infrastructure Platform 2.5: redundant iSCSI target groups with ALUA, NFS and S3 export, storage tiers; no NVMe/TCP, RDMA or Fibre Channel export found
2019	Resilience and HA	3 → 3.5	+1.5	Erasure coding with disk, node and other failure domains (feature year grade C)
2019	Scale and topology	3 → 3.5	+1.0	Erasure coding up to 17+3 needs 20 failure domains, so clusters of 20 nodes and more are supported (maximum not read)
2024	Data protection and DR	2 → 3	+2.0	6.3 (2024-11-08): Commvault and Storware backup and Coriolis DR support; asynchronous storage replication and immutable snapshots not found
2024	Kubernetes and containers	2 → 2.5	+0.5	6.3: Kubernetes 1.30 with Cilium; no CSI for third-party clusters, RWX block or KubeVirt found
2025	Operations and automation	3 → 3.5	+0.8	7.0: Grafana dashboards, SSD and NVMe wear detection, in-panel rolling upgrades; 7.3 adds a data healing dashboard
2025	Resilience and HA	3.5 → 4	+1.5	7.1 admin guide: one to three replicas or erasure coding from 1+1 to 17+3, up to three simultaneous failures, documented read-only behaviour when M+2 schemes lose two domains; no stretched clusters found
2025	Security	1.5 → 2	+0.8	7.0: S3 bucket policy builder, drift detection, secure-by-default compute; encryption at rest and key management not found

Direction, 2023 to 2026

Each release item carries one theme and one driver (V vision, C customer need, M market window, U upstream, P portfolio).

Date	Item	Theme	Driver
2024-11	6.3: external Fibre Channel storage through Cinder, Commvault, Storware and Coriolis support, Kubernetes 1.30	Data protection	M
2025-04	ZTE partnership for hyperconverged systems	Hardware	M
2025-07	7.0: Grafana dashboards, SSD and NVMe wear detection, faster S3 reads, wizard for external arrays, GPU virtualization	Operations	C
2025-07	7.0: freemium self-install and free hosted trial	Licensing	M
2026-02	One product under the Virtuozzo name with one pricing model; standalone products no longer positioned	Packaging	P
2026-03	7.3: faster erasure coding at small block sizes and a data healing dashboard	Performance	C
2026-03	7.3: GPU metering in GPU-hours	AI	V
2026-05	V/IS vision for AI infrastructure	AI	V
2026-05	Acronis Cyber Frame developed in collaboration with Virtuozzo	Packaging	M
2026-06	Opti9 signed as exclusive distributor for the US and Canada	Packaging	M
2026-06	Virtuozzo Storage S3 target Veeam Ready for Backup and Replication v13	Data protection	M
2026-10	V/IS 8.0 announced: built-in VMware migration tool GA, lite deployment, NVIDIA vGPU 20, API access control	Hypervisor integration	M
2026-10	Licensing per core and per TB of logical storage	Licensing	P

Centre of gravity: Packaging (3), Data protection (2), Licensing (2)
Blind spots (no items): Data services, Resilience, Scale, Security, Kubernetes
Driver mix: Vision 15%, Customer need 15%, Market window 54%, Upstream 0%, Portfolio 15%
Idea-to-need index: 0.18 (0 = demand-pulled, 1 = thesis-pushed)

Credibility: 14.0 / 25

Criterion	Score	Basis
Cadence	4	7.3.0 (2026-03-31), 7.3.1 (2026-05-15) and 7.4.0 (2026-07-09) with about 20 hotfixes in 2026; 7.1 and 7.2 dates not found; no published rhythm
Roadmap transparency	2	Advisory index and legacy guides public; new documentation blocked to automated reading; 2026 plans only in press releases
Say-do	3	Unification announced 2026-02-26, rename delivered with 7.3, pricing detail published only on 2026-10-15; single kernel pending
Velocity	3	Storage changes are incremental (erasure coding speed, healing dashboard, S3 features); new work is mostly GPU and packaging
Lifecycle stability	2	Renamed twice in 2026, several minor lines maintained in parallel, lifecycle policy not read

Commercial risk: 15.0 / 25 (lower is better)

Criterion	Score	Basis
Price and licence volatility	3.5	New single pricing in 2026 and a move from usable physical TB to logical TB
Purchase constraints	3	Subscription per core and per TB, storage only inside the platform; a freemium self-install exists
Channel and access	2.5	Direct sales and an exclusive North American distributor; partner terms and patch access not found
Owner stability	3	Private with undisclosed investors; new CEO and board changes in 2026 alongside a product re-bundle
Cost of staying supported	3	Lifecycle policy unread; several lines maintained in parallel

Technical lock-in: 11.5 / 25 (lower is better)

Criterion	Score	Basis
Formats	2	KVM VM disks on Virtuozzo's own distributed storage layout; exports as iSCSI, NFS and S3
Export path	2	Standard protocols out; no export tool found
Stack coupling	3.5	Storage is a component of the platform and is no longer positioned standalone
Hardware / cloud coupling	1.5	Commodity x86 servers; no cloud attach found
Skills and tooling coupling	2.5	OpenStack plus the Virtuozzo admin panel

Integrator fit: 10.5 / 20

Criterion	Score	Basis
Partner programme openness	2.5	Distributors and a service-provider focus; programme terms not found
Multi-tenancy and self-service	3.5	Native multi-tenancy and self-service through OpenStack projects (vendor claim); S3 project tenancy in 7.3 is CLI only
API and infrastructure-as-code	3	OpenStack APIs and CLI; Terraform through the OpenStack provider is an inference
Skills and certification	1.5	No training or certification programme found

AI leverage: 3.0 / 20

How the product uses AI, scored per year like capability. Only GA counts.

Criterion	2019	2022	Today	Latest step
AI workload infrastructure	0	0	1	2025: 7.0: GPU virtualization on the hosts that run the storage; S3 reads of 10 to 12 GB/s per node are a vendor figure; no AI validation of the storage
AI platform stack	0	0	0	2015: None
AI-assisted operations	0	0	0	2015: None
Agent openness	2	2	2	2019: OpenStack APIs in Virtuozzo Infrastructure Platform; API access control announced with 8.0; no MCP server

Year by year: 2015: 1.5 · 2016: 1.5 · 2017: 1.5 · 2018: 1.5 · 2019: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2022: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2026: 3

AI say-do, 2023 to 2026: 2 AI items announced; 1 GA, 0 still preview, 1 pending, 0 dropped. GPU metering shipped in 7.3; NVIDIA R595 and vGPU 20 support was announced with 8.0 on 2026-10-15 without a stated GA.

Virtuozzo's AI work sits in the platform around the storage: GPU virtualization in 7.0, GPU metering in 7.3 and NVIDIA vGPU 20 support announced with 8.0. The storage layer has no AI-assisted operations and no agent interface beyond the OpenStack APIs.

Reading

Virtuozzo Storage scores on resilience: replicas or erasure coding up to 17+3 across failure domains, with degraded behaviour written down in the admin guide. It scores low on hypervisor integration because it serves the vendor's own KVM and OpenStack hosts, and the only guidance for vSphere is an older iSCSI recommendation. Commercial risk is raised by the 2026 changes: a rename, one pricing model now measured on logical terabytes where it used to be physical, a new CEO and a lifecycle policy that could not be read. A buyer should ask how logical TB is measured before comparing quotes.

Open questions and items to re-score

Dates and contents of 7.1 and 7.2, and the contents of 7.4, were not read.
The lifecycle policy page returned 403.
Whether iSCSI or NFS from Virtuozzo Storage is supported today for vSphere, Hyper-V or Proxmox VE hosts was not found.
The unification announcement is dated 2026-01-19 in one summary and 2026-02-26 by StorageNewsletter.
GA status of the V/IS 8.0 features other than the VMware migration tool; lite deployment and API access control are not scored yet.
How logical TB is metered, and list prices, were not found.
Encryption at rest and key management were not found.
No dated release notes cover 2015 to 2023; the early steps are grade C.

	’17	’19	’24	’25
Data services core		2
Resilience and HA				1
Performance and protocols		3
Hypervisor integration
Scale and topology
Data protection and DR			1
Security				2
Operations and automation	1			3
Hardware and deployment freedom
Kubernetes and containers		1	2