VMware Assigned Sixteen Patents

Crypto proxy for cloud storage services
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,137,222) developed by Haeger, Edward Scarlett, Park City, UT, Schurig, Karl, Lehi, WA, Cenname, Michael, Seattle, WA, Elliott, Steve, Renton, WA, and Skowronski, Andrew, Hudson, CA, for a “crypto proxy for cloud storage services.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”In one embodiment, a proxy receives, from a client node, a file to be stored by a cloud storage server, where the proxy and the client node are part of a private network that does not include the cloud storage server. The proxy retrieves an encryption key associated with a user of the client node and encrypts the file using the encryption key. The proxy then transmits the encrypted file to the cloud storage server.“

The patent application was filed on October 31, 2012 (13/665,651).

Allocating datastores for VMs
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,134,922) developed by Rajagopal, Haripriya, Sunnyvale, CA, Kulkarni, Jayant, Pune, India, and Desai, Komal, Fremont, CA, for a “system and method for allocating datastores for virtual machines.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A datastore for a virtual machine that can be executed on a host computer networked to a physical storage system is allocated by a server. The server generates a unique identifier to associate with the datastore, wherein the unique identifier mimics a form of identifier that is generated by the physical storage system to identify volumes of physical storage in the physical storage system that are accessible to the host computer. At least one volume of physical storage in the physical storage system having physical storage available to satisfy the request to allocate the datastore is identified and the server maintains a mapping of the unique identifier to the at least one volume of physical storage and provides the mapping to the host computer upon running the virtual machine, thereby enabling the host computer to store data for the datastore in the at least one volume of physical storage.“

The patent application was filed on September 29, 2012 (13/631,9271).

Hybrid locking using network and on-disk based schemes
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,130,821) developed by Rawat, Mayank, Li, Jinyuan, Sunnyvale, CA, Vilayannur, Murali, San Jose, CA, and Scales, Daniel J., Mountain View, CA, for a “hybrid locking using network and on-disk based schemes.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A method of acquiring a lock by a node, on a shared resource in a system of a plurality of interconnected nodes, is disclosed. Each node that competes for a lock on the shared resource maintains a list of locks currently owned by the node. A lock metadata is maintained on a shared storage that is accessible to all nodes that may compete for locks on shared resources. A heartbeat region is maintained on a shared resource corresponding to each node so nodes can register their liveness. A lock state is maintained in the lock metadata in the shared storage. A lock state may indicate lock held exclusively, lock free or lock in managed mode. If the lock is held in the managed mode, the ownership of the lock can be transferred to another node without a use of a mutual exclusion primitive such as the SCSI reservation.“

The patent application was filed on September 23, 2013 (14/034,171).

Asynchronous unmap of thinly provisioned storage for VMs
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,128,746) developed by Venkatesan, Dhanashankar, and Aithal, Prasanna, Palo Alto, CA, for a “asynchronous unmap of thinly provisioned storage for virtual machines.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”In a computer system having virtual machines running therein, a hypervisor that supports execution of the virtual machines allocates blocks of storage to the virtual machines from a thinly provisioned logical block device. When the hypervisor deletes a file or receives commands to delete a file, the hypervisor moves the file into a delete directory. An unmap thread running in the background issues unmap commands to the storage device to release one or more blocks of the logical block device that are allocated to the files in the delete directory, so that the unmap operation can be executed asynchronously with respect to the file delete event.“

The patent application was filed on March 29, 2013 (13/853,608).

Virtual disk snapshot consolidation using block merge
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,116,726) developed by Shaikh, Faraz, Yadappanavar, Krishna, Sunnyvale, CA, and Vilayannur, Murali, San Jose, CA, for a “virtual disk snapshot consolidation using block merge.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A virtualized computer system employs a virtual disk. Multiple snapshots of the virtual disk can be created. After a snapshot is created, writes to the virtual disk are captured in delta disks. Two snapshots are consolidated by updating block references in snapshot meta data. Block reference update takes advantage of the fact that blocks for the two snapshot are managed within the same storage container and, therefore, can be moved in the snapshot logical space without incurring data copy operations. Consolidation of delta disks also gracefully handles failures during the consolidation operation and can be restarted anew after the system has recovered from failure.“

The patent application was filed on September 28, 2012 (13/630,099).

VM operations using storage system functionality
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,098,347) developed by Hiltgen, Daniel K., San Jose, CA, and Schmidt, Rene W., Risskov, Danemark, for a “implementation of virtual machine operations using storage system functionality.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”One embodiment of the present invention includes a method comprising:, (a) representing at least state data of a virtual machine in a unit of network storage of a network storage system, and, (b) employing data manipulation functionality of the network storage system to implement a virtual machine operation that manipulates at least the state data of the virtual machine.“

The patent application was filed on December 19, 2007 (11/960,491).

Live migration of virtual machine during direct access to storage over SR IOV adapter
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,086,904) developed by Goggin, Edward Joseph, Concord, MA, Subramanian, Hariharan, Wakefield, MA, Aswani, Sanjana, Boston, MA, Belay, Adam M., and Saxena, Anurekh, Cambridge, MA, for a “live migration of virtual machine during direct access to storage over SR IOV adapter.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A method is provided to migrate a virtual machine from a source computing machine to a destination computing machine comprising: suspending transmission of requests from a request queue disposed in source computing machine memory associated with the VM from the request queue to a VF, while suspending the transmission of requests, determining when no more outstanding responses to prior requests remain to be received, in response to a determination that no more outstanding responses to prior requests remain to be received, transferring state information that is indicative of locations of requests inserted to the request queue from the VF to a PF and from the PF to a memory region associated with a virtualization intermediary of the source computing machine. After transferring the state information to source computing machine memory associated with a virtualization intermediary, resuming transmission of requests from locations of the request queue indicated by the state information to the PF, and transmitting the requests from the PF to the physical storage.“

The patent application was filed on July 15, 2013 (13/941,707).

Improving performance of remote USB storage
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,081,722) developed by Barber, Peter, Stevenage, Great Britain, Rolett, Aaron, Palo Alto, CA, and Grant, Reilly, Sunnyvale, CA, for a “systems and methods for improving performance of remote USB storage.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”Methods and systems described herein facilitate improving universal serial bus, (USB) storage performance in remote computing environments. A virtual USB host is associated with a virtual machine running a guest operating system, (OS) and is configured to communicate with a USB storage device that is connected to a remote terminal. The virtual USB host is further configured to transmit one of a data-in request to the USB storage device before the guest OS transmits the data-in request or an acknowledgement of a data-out request to the guest OS before the USB storage device transmits the acknowledgement.“

The patent application was filed on December 11, 2012 (13/711,321).

Coordinated hypervisor staging of I/O data for storage devices on external cache devices
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,081,686) developed by Beveridge, Daniel James, Apollo Beach, FL, for a “coordinated hypervisor staging of I/O data for storage devices on external cache devices.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A management technique for input/output operations, (JO) leverages a hypervisor’s position as an intermediary between virtual machines, (VMs) and storage devices servicing the VMs to facilitate improvements in overall I/O performance for the VMs. According to this new I/O management technique, the hypervisor sends write requests from VMs destined for storage devices to an I/O staging device that provides higher I/O performance than the storage devices, for caching in the I/O staging device in a write-back mode. Once the I/O staging device has received and acknowledged the write request, the hypervisor immediately provides an acknowledgement to the requesting VM. Later on and asynchronously with respect to the write requests from the VMs, the hypervisor reads the write data from the I/O staging device and sends it over to the storage devices for storage therein.“

The patent application was filed on December 17, 2012 (13/717,584).

Transaction entries to achieve crash consistency
when performing write-behind caching using a flash storage-based cache
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,075,731) developed by Liu, Deng, Mountain View, CA, Phelan, Thomas A., San Francisco, CA, Vadivelu, Ramkumar, Zhang, Wei, San Jose, CA, Uttamchandani, Sandeep, Cupertino, CA, and Zhou, Li, Campbell, CA, for a “using transaction entries to achieve crash consistency when performing write-behind caching using a flash storage-based cache.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”Techniques for achieving crash consistency when performing write-behind caching using a flash storage-based cache are provided. In one embodiment, a computer system receives from a virtual machine a write request that includes data to be written to a virtual disk and caches the data in a flash storage-based cache. The computer system further logs a transaction entry for the write request in the flash storage-based cache, where the transaction entry includes information usable for flushing the data from the flash storage-based cache to a storage device storing the virtual disk. The computer system then communicates an acknowledgment to the VM indicating that the write request has been successfully processed.“

The patent application was filed on January 23, 2013 (13/748,308).

VM-granular SSD/FLASH cache live migration
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,055,119) developed by Zhou, Li, Palo Alto, CA, Nayak, Samdeep, Sunnyvale, CA, Uttamchandani, Sandeep, and Acharya, Sanjay, Palo Alto, CA, for a “method and system for VM-granular SSD/FLASH cache live migration.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”The instant disclosure describes embodiments of a system and method for migrating virtual machine, (VM)-specific content cached in a solid state drive, (SSD) attached to an original host. During operation, the original host receives event indicating an upcoming migration of a VM to a destination host. In response, the original host transmits a set of metadata associated with the SSD cache to the destination host. The metadata indicates a number of data blocks stored in the SSD cache, thereby allowing the destination host to pre-fetch data blocks specified in the metadata from a storage shared by the original host and the destination host. Subsequently, the original host receives a power-off event for the VM, and transmits a dirty block list to the destination. The dirty block list specifies one or more data blocks that have changed since the transmission of the metadata.“

The patent application was filed on March 26, 2013 (13/850,985).

Restoring VMe state from checkpoint file
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,053,065) developed by Garthwaite, Alexander Thomas, Beverly, MA, Baskakov, Yury, Newton, MA, Zhang, Irene, Seattle, WA, Christopher, Kevin Scott, Sunnyvale, CA, and Pool, Jesse, Mountain View, CA, for a “method for restoring virtual machine state from a checkpoint file.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A process for lazy checkpointing is enhanced to reduce the number of read/write accesses to the checkpoint file and thereby speed up the checkpointing process. The process for restoring a state of a virtual machine, (VM) running in a physical machine from a checkpoint file that is maintained in persistent storage includes the steps of detecting access to a memory page of the virtual machine that has not been read into physical memory of the VM from the checkpoint file, determining a storage block of the checkpoint file to which the accessed memory page maps, writing contents of the storage block in a buffer, and copying contents of a block of memory pages that includes the accessed memory page from the buffer to corresponding locations of the memory pages in the physical memory of the VM. The storage block of the checkpoint file may be compressed or uncompressed.“

The patent application was filed on December 10, 2012 (13/710,215).

Saving VM state to checkpoint file
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,053,064) developed by Garthwaite, Alexander Thomas, Beverly, MA, Baskakov, Yury, Newton, MA, Zhang, Irene, Seattle, WA, Christopher, Kevin Scott, Sunnyvale, CA, and Pool, Jesse, Mountain View, CA, for a “method for saving virtual machine state to a checkpoint file.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A process for lazy checkpointing a virtual machine is enhanced to reduce the number of read/write accesses to the checkpoint file and thereby speed up the checkpointing process. The process for saving a state of a virtual machine running in a physical machine to a checkpoint file maintained in persistent storage includes the steps of copying contents of a block of memory pages, which may be compressed, into a staging buffer, determining after the copying if the buffer is full, and upon determining that the buffer is full, saving the buffer contents in a storage block of the checkpoint file.“

The patent application was filed on December 10, 2012 (13/710,185).

Storage commands according to input-output priorities and dependencies
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,052,937) developed by Yadappanavar, Krishna, Sunnyvale, CA, Vilayannur, Murali, San Jose, CA, and Shaikh, Faraz, Sunnyvale, CA, for a “managing storage commands according to input-output priorities and dependencies.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”Input/output operations, (IOs) are issued to a storage system using request queues that are each maintained for a resource targeted by the IOs. When an IO is requested, the target resource for the IO is first identified. If a request queue is maintained for the target resource, the IO is added to the request queue and the IO is issued to the storage system as the target resource becomes available. The availability of the target resource may be determined through periodic checks or by monitoring completions of IOs issued out of the request queue.“

The patent application was filed on February 27, 2013 (13/779,051).

Software interfaces for space-optimized block devices
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,052,825) developed by Vaghani, Satyam B., San Jose, CA, and Aswathanarayana, Tejasvi, Salem, NH, for a “system software interfaces for space-optimized block devices.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”Interfaces to storage devices that employ storage space optimization technologies, such as thin provisioning, are configured to enable the benefits gained from such technologies to be sustained. Such an interface may be provided in a hypervisor of a virtualized computer system to enable the hypervisor to discover features of a logical unit number, LUN, such as whether or not the LUN is thinly provisioned, and also in a virtual machine, (VM) of the virtualized computer system to enable the VM to discover features of a virtual disk, such as whether or not the virtual disk is thinly provisioned. The discovery of these features enables the hypervisor or the VM to instruct the underlying storage device to carry out certain operations such as an operation to deallocate blocks previously allocated to a logical block device, so that the storage device can continue to benefit from storage space optimization technologies implemented therein.“

The patent application was filed on July 12, 2011 (13/181,153).

Power management and VM migration
VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,047,087) developed by Antony, Jinto, and Gupta, Puneet, Bangalore, India, for a “power management and virtual machine migration between logical storage units based on quantity of shared physical storage units.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”In a shared storage system for supporting virtual machines, virtual machine images are opportunistically migrated between logical storage units to free up physical storage units and achieve better storage hardware resource utilization and reduced power consumption by powering down freed-up physical storage units. The destination for the opportunistic migration of a virtual machine is selected based on the extent to which the physical storage units are shared between the logical storage unit in which the virtual image is currently stored and the destination. In situations where the demand for storage hardware resources increases, the powered-down physical storage units may be opportunistically powered up to meet the increased demand.“

The patent application was filed on February 1, 2012 (13/363,867).