Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.p.

Vmware, Inc.

Minwen Ji

John Wilkes

Alistair Veitch

Anne Holler

Ganesha Shanmuganathan

Keith Farkas

Elisha Ziskind

Guoqiang Shu

Carl Alan Waldspurger

John R Zedlewski

Timothy P Mann

Umit Rencuzogullari

Limin Wang

Alok Kumar Gupta

Tahir Mobashir

Sridhar Rajagopal

Michael Nelson

Marcos Kawazoe Aguilera

Mark David Lillibridge

Sahan Bamunavita Gamage

Shun-Tak Leung

Kan Zhang

Eddie Ma

Kalyanaraman Shankari

Selvi Kadirvel

George M Porter

A method of reducing power consumption of a server cluster of host systems with virtual machines executing on the host systems is provided. The method includes recommending host system power-on when there is a host system whose utilization is above a target utilization, and recommending host system power-off when there is a host system whose utilization is below the target utilization. Recommending host system power-on includes calculating impact of powering on a standby host system with respect to reducing the number of highly-utilized host systems in the server cluster. Recommending host system power-off includes calculating impact of powering off a host system with respect to decreasing the number of less-utilized host systems in the server cluster.

Reducing power consumption in a server cluster

Methods and systems for cluster resource management in virtualized computing environments are described. VM spares are used to reserve (or help discover or otherwise obtain) a set of computing resources for a VM. While VM spares may be used for a variety of scenarios, particular uses of VM spares include using spares to ensure resource availability for requests to power on VMs as well as for discovering, obtaining, and defragmenting the resources and VMs on a cluster, e.g., in response to requests to reserve resources for a VM or to respond to a notification of a failure for a given VM.

Method and system for cluster resource management in a virtualized computing environment

A system and method for performing a resource allocation diagnosis on a distributed computer system includes obtaining a target resource allocation and a snapshot of the distributed computer system, where the snapshot includes configurations and resource usage information of at least some components of the distributed computer system, and generating a resource allocation recommendation based on the target resource allocation and the snapshot by iteratively traversing a resource hierarchy in the distributed computer system. The resource allocation recommendation specifies at least one resource configuration action or at least one capacity expansion action for the distributed computer system to meet the target resource allocation.

Resource allocation diagnosis on distributed computer systems based on resource hierarchy

In one embodiment, a method for placing virtual machines in a collection is provided. A plurality of equivalence sets of hosts is determined prior to placing virtual machines in the collection. The hosts in an equivalence set of hosts are considered similar. An equivalence set of hosts in the plurality of equivalence sets is selected to place the virtual machines in the collection. The method then places at least a portion of the virtual machines in the collection on one or more hosts in the selected equivalence set of hosts.

Host selection for virtual machine placement

A method of reducing power consumption of a server cluster of host systems with virtual machines executing on the host systems is disclosed. The method includes recommending host system power-on when there is a host system whose utilization is above a target utilization, and recommending host system power-off when there is a host system whose utilization is below the target utilization. Recommending host system power-on includes calculating impact of powering on a standby host system with respect to reducing the number of highly-utilized host systems in the server cluster. The impact of powering on is calculated by simulating moving some virtual machines from highly utilized host systems to the standby host system being recommended to be powered on. Recommending host system power-off includes calculating impact of powering off a host system with respect to decreasing the number of less-utilized host systems in the server cluster. The impact of powering off is calculated by simulating moving all virtual machines from the host system, which is being recommended to be powered-off, to less -utilized host systems.

A method for restarting a virtual machine in a virtual computing system having a plurality of hosts and a resource scheduler for the plurality of hosts includes writing a placement request for the virtual machine to a shared channel that is accessible by the resource scheduler. The method further includes reading a placement result from the shared channel, wherein the placement result is generated by the resource scheduler responsive to the placement request; and restarting the virtual machine in accordance with the placement result.

System and method for restarting a workload based on global load balancing

In one embodiment, a method for placing virtual machines in a collection is provided. A plurality of equivalence sets of compatible hosts is determined prior to placing virtual machines in the collection. The hosts in an equivalence set of hosts are considered similar. An equivalence set of hosts in the plurality of equivalence sets is selected to place the virtual machines in the collection. The method then places at least a portion of the virtual machines in the collection on one or more hosts in the selected equivalence set of hosts.

Processes are balanced among multiple computer systems. The allocation policies and resource demands of multiple processes executing on multiple computer systems are used to determine the resource imbalance of the computer systems. Resource imbalance can be used to determine whether a process should be migrated from one computer system to another. Resource imbalance of multiple resources can be combined to determine overall imbalance of the computer systems. Overall imbalance can be used to determine whether a process should be migrated from one computer system to another. Imbalance of resources can be determined for resources such as processor time, memory, network bandwidth, and storage. Virtual machines can be balanced among multiple computer systems operating in a cluster.

Use of dynamic entitlement and adaptive threshold for cluster process balancing

A cost-benefit metric for load balancing virtual machines is used to estimate a net gain in resource availability achieved by a proposed virtual machine migration. The cost-benefit metric can be used together with any other known metrics to evaluate candidate migrations. The metric takes into account stability of loads as well as migration cost, hence can protect a system from thrashing, i.e., frequently migrating virtual machines without gaining resource availability.

Method and system for determining a cost-benefit metric for potential virtual machine migrations

A method for managing traffic flow through a multipath network and systems and apparatuses configured to employ such a method are provided. The method includes forwarding a packet along a first link of the multipath network and tracking a load of the first link subsequent to forwarding the packet. In addition, the method includes preserving the first link for a subsequent packet having the same flow address as the forwarded packet upon determining a desired load change of the first link is less than a predetermined value.

Traffic flow management through a multipath network

An embodiment of a method of routing a packet between nodes of a network begins with a step of determining that a route of an external network from a source node to a network node provides an expected near minimum transmission time for transmission of the packet from the source node to a destination node. The method continues with a step of determining that a packet queue for a network link at a source node exceeds a threshold. The method concludes with a step of routing the packet to the destination node via the external network and the network node.

Method of routing packet

A method, and associated apparatus, comprises calculating a first part of a message authentication function by a first processor, calculating a second part of the message authentication function by a second processor, and combining the first and second parts into the message authentication function by the first or second processor. The message authentication function can be used to authenticate data transmitted between the first processor and a third processor.

Electronic message authentication

A primary copy of data is held at a primary storage facility, while data that is redundant of the primary copy is held at a secondary storage facility. To inhibit propagation of errors from the primary copy to the redundant data, write transactions to the redundant data are queued at the second storage facility, until a specified time elapses or until a specified event occurs (or until combination hereof occurs). Write transactions may be collected in groups at the primary facility prior to forwarding to the secondary facility and may also be batched at the secondary facility prior to being applied to the redundant data. Overwrites may be allowed within a group at the primary facility to conserve communication bandwidth between the primary and secondary storage facilities. Overwrites may be allowed within a batch at the secondary facility to conserve space occupied by the transactions at the secondary facility.

Asynchronous data redundancy technique

A method for taking snapshots of data. In an embodiment, a first map data structure is obtained that records locations for a plurality of data blocks. A second map data structure is formed that is initially empty of locations, the second map data structure representing the snapshot after the snapshot is started. Writes on data that arrive before the snapshot starts are applied to the first map, and writes that arrive after the snapshot starts are applied to the second map.

Growing community of inventors

Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Minwen Ji