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US 8,751,780 B2Granted
Fast machine booting through streaming storage
AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsDustin L. Green, Jacob K. Oshins, Michael L. Neil
Life of this patent
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AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsDustin L. Green, Jacob K. Oshins, Michael L. Neil
Estimating the term…
Described is a technology by which a virtual hard disk is maintained between a far (e.g., remote) backing store and a near (e.g., local) backing store, which among other advantages facilitates fast booting of a machine coupled to the virtual hard disk. Read requests are serviced from the near backing store (e.g., a differencing layer) when the data is available thereon, or from the far backing store (e.g., a base layer) when not. The near backing store may be configured with a cache layer that corresponds to the base layer and a write differencing layer that stores writes, or a single differencing layer may be used for both caching read data and for storing write data. A background copy operation may be used to fill the cache until the far backing store data is no longer needed.
In a computing environment, a system comprising, a virtual storage device for a machine that is coupled to a near backing store, and coupled to far backing store, at least until far data of the far backing store is not needed by the machine, the far data comprising a base layer for the virtual storage device, the near data comprising at least one differencing layer corresponding to the base layer, the machine including access logic that services a read operation from near data of the near backing store when data corresponding to the read operation is available in the near backing store, or otherwise services the read from the far data.
In a computing environment, a method performed on at least one processor, comprising, providing a virtual disk having a base layer as far data and at least one differencing layer as near data, starting an operating system boot process by downloading boot code from the far data, servicing read operations from the near data when data corresponding to the read operation is available in a differencing layer of the near data or from the base layer when not available, and servicing write operations by writing data corresponding to the write operation to a differencing layer of the near data.
One or more computer-readable media having computer-executable instructions, which when executed perform steps, comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.