Parallels will announce the availability of a Template Catalog for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers tomorrow. The company says it will offer a library of more than 350 software downloads that can be used to easily create and manage operating systems and applications running in virtual environments. This seems like another great way for Parallels marketing to get the word out about their container solution. With so Parallels will announce the availability of a Template Catalog for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers tomorrow. The company says it will offer a library of more than 350 software downloads that can be used to easily create and manage operating systems and applications running in virtual environments. This seems like another great way for Parallels marketing to get the word out about their container solution. With so much confusion generated around the term virtualization these days, it becomes difficult for companies to market their virtualization products unless they are specifically going head to head with something like VMware ESX Server – the virtualization product that most people think about or hear about when the term virtualization is thrown out there. People are becoming more and more familiar with the term “hypervisor”, but the understanding of “containers” doesn’t appear as wide spread. When looking at it, the Parallels Virtuozzo Templates remind me somewhat of VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace. And perhaps, much as the marketplace has been a great marketing tool for VMware and an added bonus for VMware users, so too can the Template areas do the same for Parallels and its users. Describing it, Parallels says that when using templates, only a single instance of a software package is required and managed on a physical machine, regardless of the number of containers using the software. Parallels Virtuozzo Containers templates are very small according to the company and can be deployed rather quickly – within seconds they said. The company lists the following advantages of this approach: Templates reduce the duplication of software used multiple times on a virtualized server, making it possible to manage a single instance of software on a server. Templates can be deployed and updated online without any downtime or restarting the physical server. Because multiple containers can share real memory, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers enables 3-10 times greater density for typical workloads, as compared with other virtualization technologies. Patches and updates can be applied to a single template, and then the changes can be automatically propagated across all similar templates that reflect the update, dramatically cutting maintenance time.The Templates Catalog includes a number of Linux distributions, such as CentOS, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Ubuntu, as well as applications like MySQL, Spam Assassin, WordPress and more. “Parallels Virtuozzo Containers is the only virtualization technology that uses this innovative templates approach, which enables software to be deployed in seconds and managed once thus greatly reducing the administrative management tasks and associated time,” said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. “Our partner community is working with us to provide and extend the list of available templates.”Parallels is actively pursuing partnerships with companies and OS vendors that are interested in making their software available as a Parallels Virtuozzo Containers Template, which is located, here. Software Development