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US 2014/0208321 A1Published application
Avoiding physical fragmentation in a virtualized storage environment
AssigneeVMware, Inc.
InventorsFaraz SHAIKH, Murali VILAYANNUR
Life of this patent
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AssigneeVMware, Inc.
InventorsFaraz SHAIKH, Murali VILAYANNUR
Estimating the term…
A virtualized storage stack includes logical layers above the physical storage layer. Each logical layer allocates data blocks, and the data block allocation is propagated down to the physical storage layer. To facilitate contiguous storage, each layer of the virtualized storage stack maintains additional metadata associated with data blocks. For each data block, the metadata indicates whether the data block is free, provisioned and includes a tag that indicates when the data block was first written. Data blocks that were first written as part of the same write request share the same tag, and are mostly guaranteed to be physically co-located. Block allocations that reuse data blocks having the same tag are preferred. Such preference increases the likelihood of the blocks being contiguous in the physical storage as these blocks were allocated as part of the same first write.
A method for defragmenting physical storage that is accessed through a set of layers of a virtualization stack, the method comprising:
A non-transitory computer readable storage medium comprising instructions executable in a computer system to cause the computer system to carry out a method for defragmenting physical storage that is accessed through a set of layers of a storage stack, the method comprising:
A virtualized computing system comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.