Nutanix, Inc.

Pradeep Kashyap Ramaswamy

Rohit Jain

Tabrez Parvez Memon

Vivek Venkatesan

Prakash Narayanasamy

Vinayak Hindurao Khot

Praveen Kumar Padia

Deepak Narayan

Monil Devang Shah

Kamalneet Singh

A technique utilizes grafting and differential based (diff-based) data seeding to hydrate a special virtual disk (vdisk) on a multi-node cluster with data changes (differences) between a reference vdisk stored on the cluster and a snapshot stored in an external repository to enable failover (including failback) recovery of an application workload in a disaster recovery environment. The application workload is stored as a workload vdisk on local storage of the cluster and snapshots of the workload vdisk are generated and organized as a vdisk chain on the cluster. One or more snapshots of the vdisk chain may be replicated to the external repository using a long-term snapshot service. Each replicated snapshot may be backed up from the cluster to the external repository at the granularity of a vdisk, referred to herein as an external datasource disk. The special vdisk is a thinly provisioned, datasource-backed vdisk that is grafted onto the vdisk chain, e.g., as a child vdisk of the reference vdisk. The differences between the reference vdisk and datasource disk are seeded from the datasource disk to hydrate the datasource-backed vdisk.

Virtual disk grafting and differential based data pulling from external repository

Various embodiments set forth techniques for transactional allocation and deallocation of blocks in a block store. A first technique includes sending a first request that causes a non-persistent allocation of a block. The first technique also includes adding a first entry in a log recording the allocation as tentative, sending a second request that causes persistence of the allocation, and adding a second entry in a log recording the allocation as finalized. A second technique includes adding a first entry in a log recording a deallocation of a block, sending a first request that causes the deallocation of the block and causes the block to be unavailable for reallocation in a non-persistent manner, adding a second entry in the log recording that the deallocation is finalized, and sending a second request that causes the block to be made available for reallocation.

Transactional allocation and deallocation of blocks in a block store

Various embodiments set forth techniques for free space management in a block store. The techniques include receiving a request to allocate one or more blocks in a block store, accessing a sparse hierarchical data structure to identify an allocator page identifying a region of a backing store having a greatest number of free blocks, and allocating the one or more blocks.

Free space management in a block store

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Pradeep Kashyap Ramaswamy