International Business Machines Corporation

Lakshminarayanan Renganarayana

Xiaolan Zhang

Marco Aurelio Stelmar Netto

Christopher Charles Young

Marcos Dias De Assuncao

Praveen Jayachandran

Akshat Verma

Vasanth Bala

Kamal Bhattacharya

Marcel Schlatter

Ruchi Mahindru

Yu Deng

Soumitra Sarkar

Long Wang

Thomas Diethelm

Alexandre E Eichenberger

Harigovind Venkatraj Ramasamy

Florian Graf

Ea-Ee Jan

Balaji Viswanathan

Rema Ananthanarayanan

Kristiann J Schultz

Bharat Krishnamurthy

Vijayalakshmi Srinivasan

Kathryn Mary O'Brien

John Joseph Rofrano

Yixin Diao

Robert Filepp

Brian L Peterson

Darrell Christopher Reimer

John K P O'Brien

Xiaotong Zhuang

Niyu Ge

Uday Kumar Bondhugula

John Kevin P O'Brien

Yuan Zhao

Douglas M Barlett

Harish Dindigal

Bo Forsberg

Wolfgang O H Richter

A method of providing a computing infrastructure based on virtual machines. An update is received from a software supplier, the update including one or more patches that at least one of correct bugs, correct security vulnerabilities, or introduce at least one new functionality for virtual machines using software of the software supplier for which the update affects and is applicable. It is determined, using a processor on a computer, whether a virtual machine image, stored in a library and used as a template for instantiating virtual machines and affected by the received update, should be updated immediately in accordance with the received update. The virtual machine image is updated if it is determined that such immediate update should be implemented.

System and method for determining when cloud virtual machines need to be updated

A method of checking file system compliance including receiving a plurality of compliance rules corresponding to a file system of a production system, collecting, by a collector, file system meta data from the file system, analyzing, by an analyzer, the file system meta data using the plurality of compliance rules to determine at least one compliance deviation of the file system, and throttling the collector and the analyzer independently of one-another, wherein the collector and the analyzer are configured according to a model of performance for the production system and a schedule for the collection and analyzing.

File system compliance checking

A system, method and computer program product for allocating shared resources. Upon receiving requests for resources, the system determines whether there are any pending updates for a VM image for provisioning a virtual machine (VM) for the request. For each image with pending updates the system determines whether to replace the stored image with an updated VM image and provision from the replacement or, update a single instance of the image and provision from the single instance. The system also determines an optimal time to update images with pending updates. After replacing an image, the system provides an alert indicating that an updated said VM was provisioned.

System, method and program product for updating virtual machine images

A method for creating a workflow using system administrator actions to resolve a system issue is provided. The method may include assigning a ticket to a category. The method may include capturing a first snapshot of a first system state of a machine before a system administrator begins a corrective action. The method may include capturing a second snapshot of a second system state of the machine after system administrator corrective action. The method may include creating a difference set based on a comparison of the first snapshot and the second snapshot. The method may include generating summaries of administrator action. The method may include dividing the summaries into groups of summaries. The method may include constructing a candidate workflow for each group. The method may include presenting the candidate workflow to a subject matter expert. The method may include storing the reviewed candidate workflow in a repository.

Extraction of system administrator actions to a workflow providing a resolution to a system issue

During a process of migrating a source system into a standardized virtual environment, virtual machine instances of the source system executing in a hypervisor are snapshotted as virtual machine images in an operational repository of the hypervisor. The virtual machine images in the operational repository are short-term snapshots. From time to time during the migration process, long-term snapshots of the source system are created by checking given ones of the virtual machine images from the hypervisor operational repository into an image library as image objects.

Use of snapshots to reduce risk in migration to a standard virtualized environment

An arbitrary customer instance is transferred from a customer environment to a target managed-infrastructure-as-a-service cloud environment as a transferred image. An image adjustment plan, capturing at least one adjustment required to render the transferred image compliant with standards of the target managed-infrastructure-as-a-service cloud environment, is formulated. The image adjustment plan is executed to adjust the transferred image to obtain an adjusted image compliant with standards of the target managed-infrastructure-as-a-service cloud environment. The adjusted image is on-boarded into the managed-infrastructure-as-a-service cloud environment as a standard image thereof.

Adjustment to managed-infrastructure-as-a-service cloud standard

In an approach for detecting one or more applications in a VM, one or more processors establish a time duration. One or more processors detect two or more files, each file in the two or more files having a time stamp time that differs from a last modified time stamp time of at least one other file in the two or more files by no more than the time duration. One or more processors record an identifier for each file of the two or more files, a location, a name, and a last modified time stamp time of each file of the two or more files. One or more processors map the two or more files to an application installed on the VM.

Application discovery in virtual machines using temporal clustering of installation files

Determining which snapshot deltas tend to occur in: (i) healthy virtual machines (VMs) that have been subject to an attack yet remained healthy, and/or (ii) unhealthy VMs that have apparently been adversely affected by an attack. Snapshot deltas that occur in at least some (or more preferably all) of the healthy VM subset provide information about software changes (for example, updates, configuration changes) that may be helpful. Snapshot deltas that occur in at least some (or more preferably all) of the unhealthy VM subsets provide information about software changes (for example, updates, configuration changes) that may be unhelpful.

Security policy generation based on snapshots of similar virtual machines

A method (and structure) for providing a computing infrastructure based on virtual machines. A virtual machine provisioning system, as executed by a processor on a network, receives a virtual machine request, as an input; retrieves a virtual machine image from a library of virtual machine images, to accommodate the virtual machine request; constructs an instantiated virtual machine from the selected virtual machine image by provisioning the selected virtual machine image to accommodate the virtual machine request; and outputs the instantiated virtual machine. An image update system determines an update timing for updating at least one of the virtual machine image and the virtual machine as instantiated, based on update costs.

Systems and methods are disclosed that allow atomic updates to global data to be at least partially eliminated to reduce synchronization overhead in parallel computing. A compiler analyzes the data to be processed to selectively permit unsynchronized data transfer for at least one type of data. A programmer may provide a hint to expressly identify the type of data that are candidates for unsynchronized data transfer. In one embodiment, the synchronization overhead is reducible by generating an application program that selectively substitutes codes for unsynchronized data transfer for a subset of codes for synchronized data transfer. In another embodiment, the synchronization overhead is reducible by employing a combination of software and hardware by using relaxation data registers and decoders that collectively convert a subset of commands for synchronized data transfer into commands for unsynchronized data transfer.

Relaxation of synchronization for iterative convergent computations

Growing community of inventors

Elmsford, NY, United States of America

Lakshminarayanan Renganarayana