Working on different projects with the same set of virtual instruments is sometimes realy cumbersome. Especialy if you have really large set of instruments with many samples, as film composers often have.
It's almost impossible to open two projects the same time, because of the heavy loading of samples. And it's very time consuming to close and open projects.
 
There is only one DAW (Motus's DP) out there with a very clever solution, I would like to see in Sonar and could be a killer feature.

A global virtual instrument rack that can be shared and accessed by many current open projects. Loading each instance of an instrument only once and use them across many open projects the same time.

Maybe check out Digital Performer's V-Rack feature to get an idea.
Thanks.
Markus

You can have a look at Vienna Ensemble Pro - that allows that.
You can host on same computer, or another computer in network.
 
You've got plugins to insert in Sonar that do all the job.

@lfm
I know VE Pro and worked with it several years. But it makes some things in terms of mixing really complicated.
 
 

I have a large General Midi configuration of a soft synth that is over 2 gig and takes 5 to 10 minutes to load. It's in Kontakt, so I load up an instance of Kontakt and use a software MIDI interface to connect Sonar playing GM formatted files to Kontakt. If the Sonar Synth Rack would let me load Kontakt as a plug-in and leave it loaded for the duration of the Sonar seasion, things would work better. If Sonar would allow you to tag a plug-in as "Keep Loaded for all Projects", different projects could reference the same Rack and drastically reduce load time in a live scenario. I think Reason and other products which are primarily live performance tools do something like this.

merged with previous request

both song and track templates already do this... I don't really get what you're asking for... I create detailed templates, with instruments and specific orchestral packages all the time... 
 

The plug-ins' instance data would have to be identical for this to work (and/or SONAR then has to implement a copy-on-write process which could kill the machine!): this would seem to be a pretty unusual case, no? So of very little benefit to most users at the expense of a lot of complexity.

To get an idea of my request about a global instrument rack, check out Motu's DP V-Rack as showed in the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKf_Nd3Hs74
 
_Markus

mdages
To get an idea of my request about a global instrument rack, check out Motu's DP V-Rack as showed in the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKf_Nd3Hs74
 
_Markus

The whole v-rack concept is pretty cool.  In fact, I found the DP Chunk 5 part series pretty interesting.  There are a lot of good ideas in there.

Thanks for the DP video example.  This kind of functionality would be great for live performance, which is my application for this functionality.  If an Instrument Rack could be set for the whole Sonar session and be available to any sequence which was loaded in that session, that would allow fast switching from song to song without waiting for the long load times required by huge plug-in configurations. 
 
Templates don't solve this problem. Any song based on a template with huge plug in loads would still be saddled with the long load times.
 
The DP solution was especially elegant as the virtual instruments outputs could be further mixed and processed by the DAW. My current solution doesn't even allow me to record the audio outputs from Kontakt into Sonar.
 
I thought Sonar had permanently cured my musical Mac- envy.  Please fix this so I don't have to relapse!