Comm Vault Systems, Inc.

Ananda Venkatesha

Henry Wallace Dornemann

Rahul S Pawar

Sumer Dilip Deshpande

Ashwin Gautamchand Sancheti

Paramasivam Kumarasamy

Satish Chandra Kilaru

Rajiv Kottomtharayil

Sri Karthik Bhagi

Rajesh Polimera

Sarath Cheriyan Joseph

Santhosh Sanakkayala

Ajay Venkat Nagrale

Virtual machine (VM) proliferation may be reduced through the use of Virtual Server Agents (VSAs) assigned to a group of VM hosts that may determine the availability of a VM to perform a task. Tasks may be assigned to existing VMs instead of creating a new VM to perform the task. Furthermore, a VSA coordinator may determine a grouping of VMs or VM hosts based on one or more factors associated with the VMs or the VM hosts, such as VM type or geographical location of the VM hosts. The VSA coordinator may also assign one or more VSAs to facilitate managing the group of VM hosts. In some embodiments, the VSA coordinators may facilitate load balancing of VSAs during operation, such as during a backup operation, a restore operation, or any other operation between a primary storage system and a secondary storage system.

Virtual server agent load balancing

An illustrative 'Live Synchronization' feature in a data storage management system can reduce the downtime that arises in failover situations. The illustrative Live Sync embodiment uses backup data to create and maintain a ready (or 'warm') virtualized computing platform comprising one or more virtual machines (&#x201c;VMs&#x201d;) that are configured and ready to be activated and take over data processing from another data processing platform operating in the production environment. The &#x201c;warm&#x201d; computing platform awaits activation as a failover solution for the production system(s) and can be co-located at the production data center, or configured at a remote or disaster recovery site, which in some embodiments is configured &#x201c;in the cloud.&#x201d; Both local and remote illustrative embodiments are discussed herein. An &#x201c;incremental forever&#x201d; approach can be combined with deduplication and synthetic full backups to speed up data transfer and update the disaster recovery sites.

Live synchronization and management of virtual machines across computing and virtualization platforms including in cloud computing environments

Virtual machine (VM) proliferation may be reduced by determining the availability of existing VMs to perform a task. Tasks may be assigned to existing VMs instead of creating a new VM to perform the task. Furthermore, a coordinator may determine a grouping of VMs or VM hosts based on one or more factors associated with the VMs or the VM hosts, such as VM type or geographical location of the VM hosts. The coordinator may also assign one or more Virtual Server Agents (VSAs) to facilitate managing the group of VM hosts. In some embodiments, the coordinators may facilitate load balancing of VSAs during operation, such as during a backup operation, a restore operation, or any other operation between a primary storage system and a secondary storage system.

Virtual machine load balancing

An illustrative 'VM heartbeat monitoring network' of heartbeat monitor nodes monitors target VMs in a data storage management system. Accordingly, target VMs are distributed and re-distributed among illustrative worker monitor nodes according to preferences in an illustrative VM distribution logic. Worker heartbeat monitor nodes use an illustrative ping monitoring logic to transmit special-purpose heartbeat packets to respective target VMs and to track ping responses. If a target VM is ultimately confirmed failed by its worker monitor node, an illustrative master monitor node triggers an enhanced storage manager to initiate failover for the failed VM. The enhanced storage manager communicates with the heartbeat monitor nodes and also manages VM failovers and other storage management operations in the system. Special features for cloud-to-cloud failover scenarios enable a VM in a first region of a public cloud to fail over to a second region.

Heartbeat monitoring of virtual machines for initiating failover operations in a data storage management system, including operations by a master monitor node

The data storage system according to certain aspects can manage the archiving of virtual machines to (and restoring of virtual machines from) secondary storage. The system can determine whether to archive virtual machines based on usage data or information. The usage information may include storage usage, CPU usage, memory usage, network usage, events defined by a virtual machine software or application, etc. The system may archive virtual machines that are determined to have a low level of utilization. For example, a virtual machine can be archived when its usage level falls below a threshold level. The system may create a virtual machine placeholder for an archived virtual machine, which may be a 'light' or minimal version of the virtual machine that acts as if it is the actual virtual machine. By using a virtual machine placeholder, a virtual machine may appear to be active and selectable by the user.

Archiving virtual machines in a data storage system

Live synchronization and management of virtual machines across computing and virtualization platforms and using live synchronization to support disaster recovery

Heartbeat monitoring of virtual machines for initiating failover operations in a data storage management system, using ping monitoring of target virtual machines

The disclosed systems and methods enable a virtual machine, including any applications executing thereon, to quickly start executing and servicing users based on pre-staged data blocks supplied from a backup copy in secondary storage. Substantially concurrently with the ongoing execution of the virtual machine, a virtual-machine-file-relocation operation may move data blocks originating in the backup copy to a primary storage destination that becomes the virtual machine's primary data store after the relocation operation completes. An enhanced data agent, operating in conjunction with an enhanced media agent in a storage management system, coordinates restoring of the virtual machine and the launch of the relocation operation. The enhanced media agent may pre-stage certain backed up data blocks which may be needed to launch the virtual machine, based on predictive analysis pertaining to the virtual machine's operational profile. The enhanced media agent may also pre-stage backed up data blocks for the relocation operation, based on the operation's relocation scheme. Servicing read requests to the virtual machine may take priority over ongoing pre-staging of backed up data. Read requests may be tracked so that the media agent may properly maintain the contents of an associated read cache. Some embodiments of the illustrative storage management system may lack, or may simply not require, the relocation operation, and may operate in a 'live mount' configuration.

Growing community of inventors

Manalapan, NJ, United States of America

Ananda Venkatesha