More Efficient Virtualization Management Templates

Short Description
Many IT departments have looked to hardware virtualization solutions such as VMware and Xen to solve server sprawl. Hardware virtualization consolidates servers and helps to solve the hardware and infrastructure costs, but it can create a new problem “OS or VM sprawl”. Any hardware virtualization server contains an OS in each virtual machine as well as the host OS (even a ‘hypervisor” is a Linux-based OS). Also, virtualization makes provisioning a new OS instance so easy that administrators deploy more detailed and customized OS environments. As a result, administrators must manage hundreds of VM images with many copies of the operating system and IIS, ASP.NET, SQL Server and other middleware that have to be updated independently.

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Content
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Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 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. A master template is created on the Virtuozzo server in a proprietary template area that is used as a reference for application and OS templates loaded in virtual environments. Instead of physically copying software files and registry entries to each VE, Virtuozzo creates copy-on-write links to the main templates held in the Virtuozzo File System (VZFS) template area. The collection of links in the VE for an OS or application is referred to as a template.
In this illustration, the VEs do not contain copies of the actual bits of the OS and applications; they contain templates with links to the actual OS or application files held on in the VZFS Template Area. A virtual environment requires an OS template, and may possibly contain one or more application templates.
To keep VEs isolated and to support unique VE configuration requirements, if an OS or application running in a VE writes to a file or a registry entry, the link is broken and changes are made inside the corresponding VE. The dropped link ensures that the master template remains unchanged.
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