International Business Machines Corporation

Patrick Schaefer

Dietmar Noll

Willi Wuensch

Martin Eggers

Ajay Lunawat

Viroel Ciurea

As indicated above, aspects of the present invention provide an approach for facilitating nondisruptive virtual machine (VM) maintenance in a networked computing environment. In an embodiment, a request for an update to an active VM is received, and a copy of the active VM is taken to create a snapshot VM. An update is installed on the snapshot VM. While the snapshot VM is being updated, all changes made to the active VM are saved. Once the update is installed on the snapshot VM, the saved changes are applied to the snapshot VM. A switch is made over to the snapshot VM in real time so that the snapshot VM becomes the active VM. The process allows a user to work continuously with the software as a service (SaaS) VM without disruption.

Nondisruptive updates in a networked computing environment

An end-to-end mapping from a file system of an operating system running on a virtual machine to a storage volume of a SAN is determined. The virtual machine reported by the operating system is mapped to a definition of the virtual machine as provided by a management component managing the virtual machine. A storage device reported by the operating system is mapped to a definition of a virtual storage device as provided by the management component, such as by using a SCSI controller number and target identifier of the virtual machine storage device to correlate the virtual machine storage device to the definition. The definition of the virtual storage device is mapped to a storage device on a physical computing device on which the management component and the virtual machine are running. The storage device on the physical computing device is mapped to the storage volume of the SAN.

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Hargesheim, Germany

Patrick Schaefer