Bromium, Inc.

Martin O'Brien

Vikram Kapoor

Ian Pratt

Gaurav Banga

Kiran Bondalapati

Jacob Gorm Hansen

Krzysztof Uchronski

Approaches for creating a template virtual machine. An in-memory state of a virtual machine and/or a set of applications executing within the virtual machine are adjusted and/or configured based on the intended use of the template virtual machine. Thereafter, the virtual machine is established as a template virtual machine. The template virtual machine may be used to create one or more virtual machines using a copy-on-write memory process.

Preparing a virtual machine for template creation

Managing the guest operating system's eviction of memory pages from a virtual machine. A guest operating system or a hypervisor may cause one or more memory pages within a guest physical frame to become unlikely or ineligible for selection as a candidate for eviction by the guest operating system. Each of the one or more memory pages may also reside, or be intended to reside, in the memory of one or more other virtual machines. In this way, memory pages that are shared across multiple virtual machines may become less likely to be evicted, thereby using memory more efficiently.

Managing the eviction process

Reducing an amount of memory used by a virtual machine. A system includes multiple virtual machines that share common pages of memory. The number of private pages associated with each virtual machine is minimized by ensuring that pages that a guest operating system regards as now free or zeroed are efficiently mapped by the hypervisor to a shared zero page. Upon a hypervisor determining that one or more guest physical frame numbers are assigned to free memory pages, the hypervisor updates mapping data to map the one or more guest physical frame numbers to a shared zero page within the machine frame.

Mapping free memory pages maintained by a guest operating system to a shared zero page within a machine frame

Mitigating eviction of the memory pages of virtualized machines. Upon detecting that a request to perform an I/O operation has been issued against a block stored a disk, a determination is made as to whether a pristine copy of the contents of the block is stored in memory. If a pristine copy of the contents of the block is stored in memory, then the request may be performed by updating mapping data that maps a page of memory to a location in memory at which the pristine copy is stored. In this way, the request is performed without performing the I/O operation against the block stored on disk. Various approaches for resharing memory, including memory of a template virtual machine, are discussed.

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Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Martin O'Brien