Vmware, Inc.

Nick Michael Ryan

Matthew Eccleston

Matthew David Ginzton

Gerald C Chen

Srinivas Krishnamurti

Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin

Jesse Pool

Ishan Banerjee

Li Zheng

Preeti Agarwal

Nishant Yadav

Mohammed Junaid Ahmed

Valeriy Zhuravlev

Systems and methods are described for encrypting a swap file in a computer system. The swap file can be encrypted by a background process executing on the computer system. Processing of paging swapping operations occurs independently and separately of the background encryption of the swap file. Processing a page swapping operation can include decrypting or encrypting data to be swapped involved in the paging operation depending on the paging operation and whether or not the data to be swapped is encrypted or not.

In-place encryption of a swap file on a host machine

An administrator may set restrictions related to the operation of a virtual machine (VM), and virtualization software enforces such restrictions. There may be restrictions related to the general use of the VM, such as who may use the VM, when the VM may be used, and on what physical computers the VM may be used. There may be similar restrictions related to a general ability to modify a VM, such as who may modify the VM. There may also be restrictions related to what modifications may be made to a VM, such as whether the VM may be modified to enable access to various devices or other resources. There may also be restrictions related to how the VM may be used and what may be done with the VM. Information related to the VM and any restrictions placed on the operation of the VM may be encrypted to inhibit a user from circumventing the restrictions.

Enforcing restrictions related to a virtualized computer environment

To create a backup of a live (running) virtual machine, a backup agent may take a snapshot of the virtual machine, backup the virtual machine from the snapshot disk, and delete the snapshot. Deleting the snapshot initiates a snapshot consolidation process where delta disks of the virtual machine are collapsed. A virtual disk layer sets up a mirror driver between a current virtual disk and a target virtual disk. Data sectors of the delta disk are copied over to the target virtual disk in a single pass, while the mirror driver mirrors write request for the current virtual disk to the target virtual disk.

Online snapshot consolidation using I/O mirroring

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Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Nick Michael Ryan