Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Microsoft Corporation

Rovi Technologies Corporation

Dustin Lyle Green

Peter T Barrett

James Armand Baldwin

Jacob Kappeler Oshins

John Andrew Starks

John Henry Grossman, Iv

Neal Robert Christiansen

Geoffrey R Smith

Lars Reuther

Senthil Rajaram

Mathew John

Todd William Harris

Karan Mehra

Bruce Lee Worthington

Michael D Dodd

Chung Lang Dai

Grant Mohr

Yau Ning Chin

David C Clifford

Michael L Neil

Grant D Mohr

Eric P Traut

Ido Miles Ben-Shachar

Sriram Sampath

Ashwin Palekar

Pankaj Garg

Rajeev Y Nagar

John H Grossman

Daniel John Zigmond

Alireza Dabagh

Patrik Schnell

Shuvabrata Ganguly

Innokentiy Basmov

Alex Mark Semenko

Magnus Bo Gustaf Nyström

Narasimha Rao S S Nagampalli

Mahesh Sharad Lotlikar

Parag Chakraborty

Sambhrama Madhusudhan Mundkur

Jeffrey Kinsey

Malcolm James Smith

Olga Ivanova

Rahul Newaskar

Kevin T Carle

Sriravi Kotagiri

Mahadeva K Alladi

Palash Kar

Peter J Barrett

Micheal D Dodd

Mahesh Lotlikar

Olga B Ivanova

John H Grossman Iv

This document describes techniques for storing virtual disk payload data. In an exemplary configuration, each virtual disk extent can be associated with state information that indicates whether the virtual disk extent is described by a virtual disk file. Under certain conditions the space used to describe a virtual disk extent can be reclaimed and state information can be used to determine how read and/or write operations directed to the virtual disk extent are handled. In addition to the foregoing, other techniques are described in the claims, figures, and detailed description of this document.

Virtual disk storage techniques

Described is a technology by which a virtual hard disk is migrated from a source storage location to a target storage location without needing any shared physical storage, in which a machine may continue to use the virtual hard disk during migration. This facilitates use the virtual hard disk in conjunction with live-migrating a virtual machine. Virtual hard disk migration may occur fully before or after the virtual machine is migrated to the target host, or partially before and partially after virtual machine migration. Background copying, sending of write-through data, and/or servicing read requests may be used in the migration. Also described is throttling data writes and/or data communication to manage the migration of the virtual hard disk.

Background migration of virtual storage

A virtual machine storage service can be use a unique network identifier and a SR-IOV compliant device can be used to transport I/O between a virtual machine and the virtual machine storage service. The virtual machine storage service can be offloaded to a child partition or migrated to another physical machine along with the unique network identifier.

Virtual storage target offload techniques

Techniques for configuring a commodity server to host virtual hard disks are disclosed herein. In an exemplary embodiment, a virtual hard disk file can be split into a plurality of differencing VHD files and one or more of the files can be downloaded to a virtualization host as it runs off the VHD files stored on the server. After the one or more VHD files are downloaded, the virtualization host can be configured to use the local copy instead of the copy on the commodity server. In addition to the foregoing, other techniques are described in the claims, the detailed description, and the figures.

Techniques for streaming virtual machines from a server to a host

Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to an offload provider. In aspects, an offload provider may provide a token that represents data. The offload provider may be expected to ensure that the data the token represents will not change while the token is valid. The offload provider may take actions to ensure the immutability of the data. The actions may be taken, for example, in conjunction with receiving an offload read and/or offload write, and/or in conjunction with receiving another write that, if allowed to proceed, would otherwise change the data represented by the token.

Offload read and write offload provider

An invention is disclosed for maintaining out-of-band metadata for data. In embodiments of the invention, an upper layer of a storage stack determines that the metadata of a lower layer of that storage stack may have become out of sync. In response, the upper layer may issue a series of commands to the lower layer based on the metadata. In other embodiments of the invention, an offload-copy operation on data may also transfer out-of-band metadata so that it is applied to the data at the destination.

Re-TRIM of free space within VHDX

In an exemplary embodiment, a virtual disk file can be assigned an identifier and a virtual disk files that is dependent on the virtual disk file can include a copy of the identifier. In the instance that the virtual disk file is opened and data is modified that causes the contents of a virtual disk extent to change the identifier can be changed. If the virtual disk file and the dependent virtual disk file are used to instantiate a virtual disk the difference between identifiers can be detected, which is indicative of the fact that the virtual disk may be corrupted. Other techniques are described in the detailed description, claims, and figures that form a part of this document.

Detecting and preventing virtual disk storage linkage faults

An implementation, as described herein, facilitates fast start-up of a new media stream while avoiding temporal interruption (i.e., 'hiccups') of the presentation of that new media stream. At least one implementation, described herein, coordinates the delivery of multiple simultaneous media streams on a media-stream network. Its coordination accounts for traversal of bandwidth-restricted chokepoints; quickly stopping delivery of one or more media streams from the set of streams; quickly initiating delivery and presentation of one or more new media streams not previously in the set (i.e., a 'channel chlangee'): and producing clean playback of all of the streams in the set, despite their different timelines. This abstract itself is not intended to limit the scope of this patent. The scope of the present invention is pointed out in the appending claims.

Media stream scheduling for hiccup-free fast-channel-change in the presence of network chokepoints

Described is a technology by which a virtual hard disk is able to continue servicing virtual disk I/O (reads and writes) while a meta-operation (e.g., copying, moving, deleting, merging, compressing, defragmenting, cryptographic signing, lifting, dropping, converting, or compacting virtual disk data) is performed on the virtual disk. The servicing of virtual disk I/Os may be coordinated with meta-operation performance, such as by throttling and/or prioritizing the virtual disk I/Os. Also described is performing a meta-operation by manipulating one or more de-duplication data structures.

Virtual disk manipulation operations

Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to offload technology. In aspects, a mechanism is described that allows an offload provider to use larger tokens. The larger token may be physical or virtual. In response to an offload read command, a larger token may be created and data from the larger token may be split or injected into multiple tokens of a smaller size. In response to an offload write command, data from the multiple tokens may be combined into a larger token and/or extracted and used to obtain bulk data.

Compatibly extending offload token size

This application describes a system and techniques for managing the replication, migration, or backing up of virtual machines (VM) operating on a computing device. The techniques include managing real time or near real replication or migration of VM operations logs between computing devices. The operations logs include information or data that would enable another VM to function or operate in the same manner as the VM that generated the operations logs. Techniques are presented herein to insure the replication or migration process of VMs is not open ended or indefinite. For example, the write rate of the source operations log is managed to insure the replication or migration of the source operations log to destination device terminates within a reasonable amount of time.

System for replicating or migrating virtual machine operations log by throttling guest write iOS based on destination throughput

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Dustin Lyle Green