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US 8,751,738 B2Granted
Background migration of virtual storage
AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsDustin L. Green, Jacob K. Oshins, Lars Reuther
Life of this patent
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AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsDustin L. Green, Jacob K. Oshins, Lars Reuther
Estimating the term…
Described is a technology by which a virtual hard disk is migrated from a source storage location to a target storage location without needing any shared physical storage, in which a machine may continue to use the virtual hard disk during migration. This facilitates use the virtual hard disk in conjunction with live-migrating a virtual machine. Virtual hard disk migration may occur fully before or after the virtual machine is migrated to the target host, or partially before and partially after virtual machine migration. Background copying, sending of write-through data, and/or servicing read requests may be used in the migration. Also described is throttling data writes and/or data communication to manage the migration of the virtual hard disk.
In a computing environment, a method performed on at least one processor, comprising, migrating a virtual storage extent from a source storage location to a target storage location, including migrating a virtual machine from a first location to a second location before copying any portion of the virtual storage extent to the target storage location, before copying all of the virtual storage extent to the target storage location, or after copying all of the virtual storage extent to the target storage location while continuing to allow access to virtual storage data of the virtual storage extent independent of where each part of the virtual storage data is physically located during the migrating, and servicing a read request at the second location by determining whether read data corresponding to the read request has been already migrated to the target storage location, and if so, using that data, and if not, by obtaining the read data from the source storage location or another location accessible to the second location.
In a computing environment, a system comprising, at least one processor, a memory communicatively coupled to the at least one processor and including components comprising, one or more agents configured to control migration of a virtual hard disk and a virtual machine from a source virtual machine host to a target virtual machine host while providing the virtual machine with data from virtual storage data of the virtual hard disk independent of where each part of the virtual storage data is physically located during the migrating, wherein the one or more agents are further configured to migrate the virtual machine from the source virtual machine host to the target virtual machine host before any portion of the virtual hard disk is copied to the target virtual machine host, before all of the virtual hard disk is copied to the target virtual machine host, or after all of the virtual hard disk is copied to the target virtual machine host, wherein the one or more agents are further configured to send newly written writes directed towards the source virtual machine host as written data to the target virtual machine host, and perform a background copy of data from the source virtual machine host to the target virtual machine host.
One or more computer readable storage media having computer executable instructions stored thereon, which when executed in response to execution by a computer, cause the computer to perform steps, comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.