Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Other

Matthew Douglas Hendel

Rene Antonio Vega

Eric P Traut

Landy Wang

Bryan M Willman

Forrest Curtis Foltz

Adrian J Oney

Ernest S Cohen

John Te-Jui Sheu

Shuvabrata Ganguly

Sharvil A Nanavati

Bradley Gene Calder

Andrew James Edwards

Jaidev Haridas

Jiesheng Wu

David Allen Goebel

Lars Reuther

Ishai Ben Aroya

René A Vega

Ozan Demir

Yuan Zheng

Fnu Sidhartha

Rajesh Natvarlal Davé

Tamás Gál

Jean Ghanem

Jane Win-Shih Liu

Robert Bradley Bennett

Chun Yuan

Idan Avraham

Kent David Forschmiedt

Shuitao Fan

Aung Maw Oo

Phillip Taron

Jaiden Haridas

In various embodiments, methods and systems for providing access to file systems are provided. An SFA-based operation having an operation modifier for a file in a file system is received. The SFA-based operation is defined based on a file-representational state transfer (REST) interface. The SFA-REST interface comprises integrated functionality of an SFA protocol and REST protocol. The SFA-based operation is executed using the operation modifier. A REST-based operation for the file in the distributed file storage is received. The REST-based operation is defined based on the SFA-REST interface. The operation modifier is referenced in order to execute the REST-based operation. The REST-based operation based on the SFA-REST interface. A schema can be implemented for accessing the file system. The schema includes tables to store files, the table comprises fields corresponding to elements of a SFA-REST interface. A snapshot component can be implemented to backup file shares in the file system.

File service using a shared file access-rest interface

Described is a technology by which a virtual machine may be safely migrated to a computer system with a different platform. Compatibility of the virtual machine may be checked by comparing the virtual machine's capabilities against those of the new platform. To ensure compatibility, when created the virtual machine may have its capabilities limited by the lowest common capabilities of the different platforms available for migration. Computer systems may be grouped into migration pools based upon similar capabilities, and/or a virtual machine may be mapped to certain computer systems based upon capabilities needed by that virtual machine, such as corresponding to needed performance, fault tolerance and/or flexibility.

Virtual machine homogenization to enable migration across heterogeneous computers

Efficient power management of a system with virtual machines is disclosed. In particular, such efficient power management may enable coordination of system-wide power changes with virtual machines. Additionally, such efficient power management may enable coherent power changes in a system with a virtual machine monitor. Furthermore, such efficient power management may enable dynamic control and communication of power state changes.

Efficient power management of a system with virtual machines

In various embodiments, methods and systems for transferring data using a storage medium are provided. A storage medium may be shipped by a customer to a datacenter such that the data on the storage medium is copied to a storage associated with the datacenter or data in the storage is copied to the storage medium. The datacenter may support a cloud computing infrastructure that provides a storage account to the customer that is associated with the data copied from or copied to the storage medium. The storage medium further corresponds to a data transfer manifest that includes at least in part data mapping between storage service infrastructure and data in the storage medium. It is contemplated that embodiments of the present invention may further be implemented with data transfer service components that support a client component, storage service component, and a data transfer management component.

Data transfer service

Various mechanisms are disclosed for improving the operational efficiency of a virtual translation look-aside buffer (TLB) in a virtual machine environment. For example, one mechanism fills in entries in a shadow page table (SPT) and additionally, speculatively fills in other entries in the SPT based on various heuristics. Another mechanism allows virtual TLBs (translation look-aside buffers) to cache partial walks in a guest page table tree. Still another mechanism allows for dynamic resizing of the virtual TLB to optimize for run-time characteristics of active workloads. Still another mechanism allows virtual machine monitors (VMMs) to support legacy and enlightened modes of virtual TLB operation. Finally, another mechanism allows the VMM to remove only the stale entries in SPTs when linking or switching address spaces. All these mechanisms, together or in part, increase the operational efficiency of the virtual TLB.

Operational efficiency of virtual TLBs

For failure management for multiple operating systems in a virtual environment, an external virtual machine or agent is provided that has been granted rights to full physical memory space to perform a crashdump for the machine. To avoid exposing secret information during a crashdump, private information for a virtual machine or partition is encrypted prior to generating a dump. The storing of crashdump information for virtual machines may avoid storing crashdump information for virtual machines that are stateless. Instead of having an (unstable) operating system running within a virtual machine perform a crashdump, the provision of an external agent, e.g., an external virtual machine, to perform the crashdump avoids many limitations associated with a normal dump when performed by a crashed operating system.

Failure management for a virtualized computing environment

Various operations are disclosed for improving the operational efficiency of a virtual translation look-aside buffer (TLB) in a virtual machine environment. For example, operations are disclosed that allow for determination of whether present entries in shadow page tables (SPTs) are stale by comparing shadowed guest page table (GPT) entries against snapshots taken when the entries were cached. Other operations are disclosed that allow a virtual machine monitor (VMM) to access shadow page table trees (SPTTs) by walking trees in software or in hardware. Still other operations are disclosed allowing the VMM to use a hash table to relate GVA ranges to SPTs that map them, thus significantly reducing the cost of having to walk each SPTT in order to invalidate desired GVA(s). And, finally, operations are disclosed allowing the VMM to determine global GVA ranges by checking a bitmap, when invalidating global GVAs.

Reduction of operational costs of virtual TLBs

Various operations are provided that improve the scalability of virtual TLBs in multi-processor virtual machines, and they include: implicitly locking SPTs using per-processor generation counters; waiting for pending fills on other virtual processors to complete before servicing a GVA invalidation using the counters; write-protecting or unmaping guest pages in a deferred two-stage process or reclaiming SPTs in a deferred two-stage process; periodically coalescing two SPTs that shadow the same GPT with the same attributes; sharing SPTs between two SASes only at a specified level in a SPTT; flushing the entire virtual TLB using a generation counter; allocating a SPT to GPT from a NUMA node on which the GPT resides; having an instance for each NUMA node on which a virtual machine runs; and, correctly handling the serializing instructions executed by a guest in a virtual machine with more than one virtual processor sharing the virtual TLB.

Scalability of virtual TLBs for multi-processor virtual machines

Growing community of inventors

Seattle, WA, United States of America

Matthew Douglas Hendel