Vmware, Inc.

Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.p.

Curt Kolovson

Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin

Ilia Langouev

Patrick William Penzias Dirks

Examples maintain consistency of writes for a plurality of VMs during live migration of the plurality from a source host to a destination host. The disclosure intercepts I/O writes to a migrated VM at a destination host and mirrors the I/O writes back to the source host. This 'reverse replication' ensures that the CG of the source host is up to date, and that the source host is safe to fail back to if the migration fails.

Maintaining consistency using reverse replication during live migration

Examples perform live migration of VMs from a source host to a destination host using destructive consistency breaking operations. The disclosure makes a record of a consistency group of VMs on storage at a source host as a fail-back in the event of failure. The source VMs are live migrated to the destination host, disregarding consistency during live migration, and potentially violating the recovery point objective. After live migration of all of the source VMs, consistency is automatically restored at the destination host and the live migration is declared a success.

Using a recovery snapshot during live migration

Examples perform live migration of objects such as VMs from a source host to a destination host. The disclosure exposes the contents of the storage disk at the destination host, compares the storage disk of the destination host to the source host, and during migration, migrates only data which is not already stored at the destination host. The source and destination VMs have concurrent access to storage disks during migration. After migration, the destination VM executes, with exclusive access to the storage disks.

Using a delta query to seed live migration

The disclosure describes performing live migration of objects such as virtual machines (VMs) from a source host to a destination host. The disclosure changes the storage environment, directly or through a vendor provider, to active/passive synchronous or near synchronous and, during migration, migrates only data which has not already been replicated at the destination host. The source and destination VMs have concurrent access to storage disks during migration. After migration, the destination VM executes with exclusive access to the storage disks, and the system is returned to the previous storage environment of active/passive asynchronous.

Using active/passive asynchronous replicated storage for live migration

Examples perform live migration of VMs from a source host to a destination host. The disclosure changes the storage environment, directly or through a vendor provider, to active/active synchronous and, during migration, migrates only data which is not already stored at the destination host. The source and destination VMs have concurrent access to storage disks during migration. After migration, the destination VM executes, with exclusive access to the storage disks, and the system is returned to the previous storage environment (e.g., active/active asynchronous).

Using active/active asynchronous replicated storage for live migration

An exemplary storage network, storage controller, and methods of operation are disclosed. In one embodiment, a method of managing cache memory in a storage controller comprises receiving, at the storage controller, a cache hint generated by an application executing on a remote processor, wherein the cache hint identifies a memory block managed by the storage controller, and managing a cache memory operation for data associated with the memory block in response to the cache hint received by the storage controller.

Growing community of inventors

Redwood City, CA, United States of America

Curt Kolovson