On-the-Fly Replacement of Physical Hardware with Emulation
AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsDustin L. Green, Jacob Oshins
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Various aspects are disclosed herein for replacing the hardware backing the memory locations associated with a virtual machine with a backing mechanism. The backing mechanism may have the memory locations appear to contain data convenient to the driver in the virtual machine, typically containing what the hardware would have returned if the hardware had been read from. The data image being returned from the memory locations may travel with the virtual machine even if the virtual machine moves to a different physical machine that does not contain hardware equivalent to the hardware that was recently removed from the virtual machine.
Claims20
A method of managing hardware resources in a virtual machine environment, comprising:
- emulating functionality of a hardware resource in the virtual machine environment;
- and
- maintaining accessibility to said emulated functionality when said hardware resource has been removed from said virtual machine environment.
A system adapted to disassociate a hardware resource from a virtual machine environment, comprising:
- a computing device comprising at least one processor;
- a memory communicatively coupled to said processor when said system is operational;
- said memory having stored therein computer instructions that upon execution by the at least one processor cause:
- emulating functionality of a hardware resource in the virtual machine environment;
- and
- maintaining accessibility to said emulated functionality when said hardware resource has been removed from said virtual machine environment.
A computer readable storage medium storing thereon computer executable instructions for disassociating a hardware resource from a virtual machine environment, comprising instructions for:
- emulating functionality of a hardware resource in the virtual machine environment;
- and
- maintaining accessibility to said emulated functionality when said hardware resource has been removed from said virtual machine environment.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.