Vmware, Inc.

Benjamin J Corrie

Adrian Drzewiecki

Mark Russell Johnson

George Gregory Hicken

Rajesh Venkatasubramanian

Zhelong Pan

Sahan Bamunavita Gamage

Harsh Kumar

Richard McDougall

Pranshu Jain

Anne Holler

Derek William Beard

Scott Howard Davis

Michal Ostrowski

Jianjun Shen

Jayanth Gummaraju

Abhishek Srivastava

Kinshuk Govil

Wei Lun Huang

Gaetano Borgione

Michal Adam Jankowski

Christian Lita

Zhenhua Yang

Vinay Reddy

Zach James Shepherd

Mark Johnson

Aaron Sweemer

Clint Greenwood

Container images are managed in a clustered container host system with a shared storage device. Hosts of the system each include a virtualization software layer that supports execution of virtual machines (VMs), one or more of which are pod VMs that have implemented therein a container engine that supports execution of containers within the respective pod VM. A method of deploying containers includes determining, from pod objects published by a master device of the system and accessible by all hosts of the system, that a new pod VM is to be created, creating the new pod VM, and spinning up one or more containers in the new pod VM using images of containers previously spun up in another pod VM, wherein the images of the containers previously spun up in the other pod VM are stored in the storage device.

Global cache for container images in a clustered container host system

Some embodiments of the invention provide a novel network architecture for deploying guest clusters (GCs) including workload machines for a tenant (or other entity) within an availability zone. The novel network architecture includes a virtual private cloud (VPC) deployed in the availability zone (AZ) that includes a centralized routing element that provides access to a gateway routing element of the AZ. In some embodiments, the centralized routing element provides a set of services for packets traversing a boundary of the VPC. The services, in some embodiments, include load balancing, firewall, quality of service (QoS) and may be stateful or stateless. Guest clusters are deployed within the VPC and use the centralized routing element of the VPC to access the gateway routing element of the AZ.

Hierarchical networking for nested container clusters

Container images are fetched in a clustered container host system with a shared storage device. Fetching a first container image in a first virtual machine includes creating a first virtual disk in the shared storage device, storing an image of the first container in the first virtual disk, mounting the first virtual disk to the first virtual machine, and updating a metadata cache to associate the image of the first container to the first virtual disk. Fetching a second container image in a second virtual machine includes checking the metadata cache to determine that a portion of the image of the second container is stored in the first virtual disk, creating a second virtual disk in the shared storage device, adding a reference to the first virtual disk in a metadata of the second virtual disk, and mounting the second virtual disk to the second virtual machine.

Image file optimizations by opportunistic sharing

Container images are managed in a clustered container host system with a shared storage device. Hosts of the system include a virtualization software layer that supports execution of virtual machines (VMs) in the hosts, and one or more VMs have implemented therein a container engine that supports execution of containers within the respective VMs. Deploying a container in a first VM includes creating a virtual disk in the storage device, storing a container image in the virtual disk, mounting the virtual disk to the first VM, and updating a metadata cache to associate the container image to the virtual disk. Deploying the container in a second VM executed in a host different from a host in which the first VM is executed, includes checking the metadata cache to determine that the container image is stored in the virtual disk, and mounting the virtual disk to the second VM.

This disclosure describes a process for securely instantiating a virtual machine on a server cluster. The virtual machine just after instantiation has access to persistent storage that includes an encrypted region and lacks access to an encryption key configured to provide access to data stored within the encrypted region. The virtual machine receives a communication from a management server associated with the server cluster that includes the encryption key configured to provide access to the data stored within the encrypted region. After the virtual machine receives the encryption key, the server cluster runs services that depend upon the data stored within the encrypted region to operate after receiving the communication from the management server.

Protection of authentication data of a server cluster

Various aspects are disclosed for unified resource management of containers and virtual machines. A podVM resource configuration for a pod virtual machine (podVM) is determined using container configurations. The podVM comprising a virtual machine (VM) that provides resource isolation for a pod based on the podVM resource configuration. A host selection for the podVM is received from a VM scheduler. The host selection identifies hardware resources for the podVM. A container scheduler is limited to bind the podVM to a node corresponding to the hardware resources of the host selection from the VM scheduler. The podVM is created in a host corresponding to the host selection. Containers are started within the podVM. The containers correspond to the container configurations.

Unified resource management for containers and virtual machines

A virtualized computing system includes: a host cluster including hosts executing a virtualization layer on hardware platforms thereof, the virtualization layer configured to support execution of virtual machines (VMs), the VMs including a pod VM, the pod VM including a container engine configured to support execution of containers in the pod VM, the pod VM including a first virtual disk attached thereto; and an orchestration control plane integrated with the virtualization layer, the orchestration control plane including a master server in communication with a pod VM controller, the pod VM controller configured to execute in the virtualization layer external to the VMs and cooperate with a pod VM agent in the pod VM, the pod VM agent generating root directories for the containers in the pod VM, each of the root directories comprising a union a read/write ephemeral layer stored on the first virtual disk and a read-only layer.

Ephemeral storage management for container-based virtual machines

Methods, systems, and computer programs for providing an application server appliance utilizing one or more virtual machines are described. The application server appliance may be a virtual machine having a reduced guest operating system, a runtime environment, and a management agent installed therein. An appliance controller automatically determines one or more configurations and/or settings for the runtime environment based on a variety of factors, including the set up of the virtual machine appliance. The appliance controller generates an application package having the determined settings and transmits the package to the application server appliance, wherein the application package is configured to be executed by the runtime environment.

Execution of an application in a runtime environment installed in a virtual appliance

A mechanism is provided for managing memory of a runtime environment executing on a virtual machine. A balloon agent that is part of a runtime environment is configured to coordinate inflations of a memory balloon within a heap of' the runtime environment and an out-of-heap overflow balloon, particularly in situations where a hypervisor needs to reclaim more memory from the runtime environment than the runtime environment is able to give up. The balloon agent may slowly free out-of-heap balloon memory, which may cause an increase of a target size for the balloon agent, which in turn inflates the memory balloon inside the heap of the runtime environment.

Hybrid in-heap out-of-heap ballooning for java virtual machines

A mechanism is provided for managing memory of a virtual machine having a runtime environment executing therein. The runtime environment includes a balloon agent that allocates memory objects within heap memory of the runtime environment and hints to a hypervisor that machine memory pages backing the memory objects may be candidates for page sharing. At launch of the runtime environment, the balloon agent allocates memory objects in response to detecting a state of high machine memory consumption by the virtual machine. Further, while the runtime environment is running, the balloon agent allocates memory objects within heap memory when the runtime environment becomes idle.

Proactive memory reclamation for java virtual machines

A mechanism is provided for managing memory of a runtime environment executing on a virtual machine. The mechanism includes an elastic cache made of objects within heap memory of the runtime environment. When the runtime environment and virtual machine are not experiencing memory pressure from a hypervisor, the objects of the elastic cache may be used to temporarily store application-level cache data from applications running within the runtime environment. When memory pressure from the hypervisor is exerted, the objects of the elastic cache are re-purposed to inflate a memory balloon within heap memory of the runtime environment.

Elastic caching for Java virtual machines

A distributed computing application is described that provides a highly elastic and multi-tenant platform for Hadoop applications and other workloads running in a virtualized environment. Multiple instances of a distributed computing framework, such as Hadoop, may be executed concurrently. A centralized manager detects when contention for computing resources, such as memory and CPU, causes tasks to run slower on VMs executing on a given host, and scales up or scales down a cluster based on the detected resource contention.

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San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Benjamin J Corrie