Vmware, Inc.

Marc Sevigny

Christos Karamanolis

Keith Farkas

Sridhar Rajagopal

Elisha Ziskind

Ronald Passerini

Rostislav Vavrick

Techniques are disclosed for maintaining high availability (HA) for virtual machines (VMs) running on host systems of a host cluster, where each host system executes a HA module in a plurality of HA modules and a storage module in a plurality of storage modules, where the host cluster aggregates, via the plurality of storage modules, locally-attached storage resources of the host systems to provide an object store, where persistent data for the VMs is stored as per-VM storage objects across the locally-attached storage resources comprising the object store, and where a failure causes the plurality of storage modules to observe a network partition in the host cluster that the plurality of HA modules do not. In one embodiment, a host system in the host cluster executing a first HA module invokes an API exposed by the plurality of storage modules for persisting metadata for a VM to the object store. If the API is not processed successfully, the host system: (1) identifies a subset of second HA modules in the plurality of HA modules; (2) issues an accessibility query for the VM to the subset of second HA modules in parallel, the accessibility query being configured to determine whether the VM is accessible to the respective host systems of the subset of second HA modules; and (3) if at least one second HA module in the subset indicates that the VM is accessible to its respective host system, transmits a command to the at least one second HA module to invoke the API on its respective host system.

Maintaining high availability during network partitions for virtual machines stored on distributed object-based storage

Techniques are disclosed for maintaining high availability (HA) for virtual machines (VMs) running on host systems of a host cluster, where each host system executes a HA module in a plurality of HA modules and a storage module in a plurality of storage modules, where the host cluster aggregates, via the plurality of storage modules, locally-attached storage resources of the host systems to provide logical data store, and where persistent data for the VMs is stored across the locally-attached storage resources comprising the logical data store.

Techniques are disclosed for orchestrating high availability (HA) failover for virtual machines (VMs) running on host systems of a host cluster, where the host cluster aggregates locally-attached storage resources of the host systems to provide an object store, and where persistent data for one or more of the VMs is stored as per-VM storage objects across the locally-attached storage resources comprising the object store. In one embodiment, a host system in the host cluster executing a HA module determines a VM to be restarted on an active host system in the host cluster. The host system further determines if the VM's persistent data is stored in the object store. If so, the host system adds the VM to a list of VMs to be immediately restarted. Otherwise, the host system checks whether the VM is accessible to the host system by querying a storage layer of the host system configured to manage the object store.

Orchestrating high availability failover for virtual machines stored on distributed object-based storage

Techniques are disclosed for persisting high availability (HA) protection state for virtual machines (VMs) running on host systems of a host cluster, where the host cluster aggregates locally-attached storage resources of the host systems to provide an object store, and where persistent data for the VMs is stored as per-VM storage objects across the locally-attached storage resources comprising the object store. In one embodiment, a host system in the host cluster executing a HA module determines an identity of a VM that has been powered-on in the host cluster. The host system then persists HA protection state for the VM in a storage object of the VM, where the HA protection state indicates that the VM should be restarted on an active host system in the case of a failure in the host cluster.

Persisting high availability protection state for virtual machines stored on distributed object-based storage

In one or more embodiments of the invention, communication among host agents providing high availability in a computer cluster is implemented by reading and writing to files on a shared data store. Each host agent holds a lock on a file on the shared data store corresponding to a liveness indicator for the host agent and a coordinator host agent periodically monitors the liveness indicators for host failures.

Growing community of inventors

Harvard, MA, United States of America

Marc Sevigny