Systems and methods for protecting virtualized assets

#This application claims the benefit under 35 U.S.C. §119 of Indian Patent Application No. 5013/CHE/2013 filed on Nov. 7, 2013 which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety for all purposes.

#Technical Field

#The technical field generally relates to power management within information technology (IT) environments, and more particularly, to systems and methods for managing and protecting virtualized assets.

#Various aspects of at least one embodiment are discussed below with reference to the accompanying figures, which are not intended to be drawn to scale. The figures are included to provide an illustration and a further understanding of the various aspects and embodiments, and are incorporated in and constitute a part of this specification, but are not intended as a definition of the limits of any particular embodiment. The drawings, together with the remainder of the specification, serve to explain principles and operations of the described and claimed aspects and embodiments. In the figures, each identical or nearly identical component that is illustrated in various figures is represented by a like numeral. For purposes of clarity, not every component may be labeled in every figure. In the figures:

#FIG. 1 is a block diagram of various types of Hypervisor configurations;

#FIG. 2 is one example of an IT environment with virtualized assets;

#As discussed above, virtualization technologies have become widespread in IT environments. In a traditional IT environments (e.g., data centers, server rooms, IT closets, etc) each server typically hosts a single operating system (OS) which in turn may host one or more shared resources such as web servers, databases, and storage repositories. In contrast, virtualized environments include servers which are configured to host one or more virtual machines. These servers are commonly referred to as hosts or Hypervisors. Virtual machines may also be referred to as guest operating systems. A Hypervisor presents the guest operating systems with a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of the guest operating systems. Multiple instances of a variety of operating systems may share the virtualized hardware resources. A virtual machine, as referred to herein, is a software implementation of a computer that executes programs like a physical machine.

#Hypervisors may be configured in one or more ways. For example, FIG. 1 illustrates various types of Hypervisors generally indicated at 100. The types 100 include a bare-metal type 102 and a hosted type 104. In regards to the bare-metal type 102, the Hypervisor is executed directly on the host server's hardware. Guest operating systems on the bare-metal type 102 operate at what is considered two levels from the server hardware (e.g., the operating system and Hypervisor are interfaced). In regards to the hosted-type 104, the Hypervisor is hosted and executed by an OS (e.g., Linux, Windows Server, etc). In this configuration, the virtual machine is executed by a Hypervisor application which is typically compatible with the operating system of the host. For example, VMware vSphere® offered by VMWare of Palo Alto, Calif. is one example of a hosted type 104 virtualization solution. Guest operating systems on the hosted type 104 operate at what is considered three levels from the server hardware.

#As IT environments become increasingly virtualized it can become complex to ensure that each Hypervisor is adequately protected. Some IT environments may include a mix of virtualized technologies including servers configured as both the bare-metal type 102 and the hosted type 104. Traditional power management includes specialized software which is executed by an OS. For this reason, the specialized software may be incompatible with the bare-metal type 102 as the specialized software requires compatible operating systems. The hosted type 104 may be compatible with the specialized software; however, it may be impractical to install specialized software on each and every server.