Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Saad Syed

Sushant Pramod Rewaskar

Ajay Mani

Asad Yaqoob

Christopher Scott Dickens

Muhammad Umer Azad

Corey M Sanders

Abhishek Kumar Singh

Anil A Ingle

Akram Hassan

Wei Zhao

Gaurav Jagtiani

Charles T Lenzmeier

Alaa H Abdelhalim

Eron D Wright

Thiruvengadam Venketesan

Jeremy Sadler

Gaurav Gupta

Pavel Anatolievich Dournov

Luis Irun-Briz

Christopher Paul Almida

Srikanth Raghavan

Chuck Lenzmeier

Patrick B Azzarello

Andrew James Edwards

James Ernest Johnson

Kai Chen

Yousef A Khalidi

Karthik Raman

Jose Bernabeu-Auban

Ashish B Shah

Richard Allen Pletcher

Todd F Pfleiger

Wesley G Miller

Chetan S Shankar

Melur K Raghuraman

Zhong Deng

Nisarg Tarakkumar Sheth

Pavithra Tyamagondlu Nagesharao

Blaine Young

Vivek P Divakara

Ivan Santa Maria Filho

Maxim Khutornenko

Raghu Murthy

Mian Naeem Ul Haque

Suraj Puri

James E Johnson

John F Macintyre

Francis M David

C Scott Dickens

Umer Azad

Maxim Khutomenko

Charles Thomas Lenzmeier

Anil Ingle

Abhishek Singh

Melur Raghuraman

Richard A Pletcher

Sushant Pramad Rewaskar

The present disclosure relates to systems, methods, and computer readable media for rightsizing virtual machine deployments on a cloud computing system. For example, systems disclosed herein may predict utilization of resources for a customer deployment and determine a desired goal state including a deployment of virtual machines having rightsized specifications that align more closely with the predicted utilization. Systems disclosed herein may utilize the goal state in view of the deployment data, policies, and other information to determine an action plan including deployment actions for transitioning a current state of a customer deployment to the goal state. By rightsizing virtual machine deployments, systems described herein may affect more efficient utilization of cloud computing resources and decrease costs associated with over-allocation of cloud computing resources.

Rightsizing virtual machine deployments in a cloud computing environment

A virtual machine hosting environment executing on a physical machine is operable to instantiate a virtual machine that is capable of initiating I/O operations directed to a remote storage. The virtual machine hosting environment is operable to determine when an unavailability condition exists with respect to the remote storage and when such unavailability condition no longer exists. The virtual machine hosting environment is further operable to suspend the virtual machine based at least on the determination that the unavailability condition exists and to resume the virtual machine based at least on the determination that the unavailability condition no longer exists. The virtual machine hosting environment may be still further operable to save one or more pending I/O requests generated by the virtual machine in conjunction with pausing the virtual machine and to send the pending I/O request(s) to the remote storage in conjunction with resuming the virtual machine.

Mitigation of impact of intermittent storage unavailability on virtual machines

Methods, systems, and computer-readable media for deploying an updated image to nodes propagated throughout a distributed computing platform are provided. Upon receiving an indication to install a patch to an operating system residing on the nodes, an existing image of the operating system is accessed at a staging service. The staging service generates the updated image by applying the patch to the existing image. The process of applying the patch includes mounting the existing image of the operating system to a virtual machine, copying the patch to the mounted existing image, setting a command within the existing image that executes upon activating the virtual machine, and activating the virtual machine, thereby executing the command. This directs the patch to be installed. The updated image is pushed to the nodes. The nodes are configured to utilize the updated image as the operating system without performing an individual installation of the patch.

Consistent operating system servicing for distributed nodes

Embodiments described herein are directed to migrating affected services away from a faulted cloud node and to handling faults during an upgrade. In one scenario, a computer system determines that virtual machines running on a first cloud node are in a faulted state. The computer system determines which cloud resources on the first cloud node were allocated to the faulted virtual machine, allocates the determined cloud resources of the first cloud node to a second, different cloud node and re-instantiates the faulted virtual machine on the second, different cloud node using the allocated cloud resources.

Healing cloud services during upgrades

Embodiments provide migration of services across different clusters to balance utilization and meet customer demands. Different service migration options may be performed with or without downtime. The artifacts of the service are moved to a new destination cluster. The service is created on the new destination cluster and staged so that the service is almost ready to start. In one embodiment, the service is stopped on the old cluster and started on the new cluster. After stopping the service, DNS is updated to point to the service on the new cluster. In another embodiment, the service is stopped on the old cluster and started on the new cluster with the same IP address to avoid DNS reprogramming and associated delays. In a further embodiment, the migration is performed without downtime by moving the service part by part from one cluster to another.

Service migration across cluster boundaries

Tenant and server platform coordination of the performance of atomic tasks that are to be performed by the platform, but which have at least a potential impact on the tenant. The server platform allows a particular tenant a timeframe within which the tenant itself may approve of initiation of each of one or more tasks. The server platform may protect itself from delayed action by imposing time constraints on the timeframe such that after the timeframe is elapsed, the tenant no longer has control over triggering the initiation of the particular task. Accordingly, the tenant is provided with flexibility on controlling initiation of a task performed by the server platform, while the server platform maintains a level of control to protect its resources and balances the needs of the various tenants.

Tenant control in initiating atomic platform tasks

In an environment that includes a host computing system that executes virtual machines, and a secure cloud computing channel that communicatively couples the host to a client computing system that is assigned to a particular one of the virtual machines, the particular virtual machine generates a certificate, install the certificate on the itself, and returns a certificate representation to the client. This may occur when the virtual machine is provisioned. During a subsequent connection request from the client to the virtual machine, the virtual machine returns the certificate to the client. The client compares the certificate representation that was returned during provisioning with the certificate returned during the subsequent connection, and if there is a match, then the virtual machine is authenticated to the client. Thus, in this case, the virtual machine authenticates without the client having to generate, install, and manage security for a certificate.

Certificate based connection to cloud virtual machine

The provisioning of a virtual machine when booted from virtual storage. During virtual machine boot from an image, the virtual machine detects storage media. The virtual machine acquires a provisioning agent and provisioning data from the detected storage media. The virtual machine uses the provisioning data to provision itself, and executes the provisioning agent. The provisioning agent may monitor the progress of the provisioning and/or report a status of the provisioning. The virtual machine may operate in a cloud computing environment, the status of the provisioning agent being returned to the user through the cloud environment. The user need not generate the provisioning data in a format readable by the virtual machine. Instead, perhaps some naturally entered user input is used to automatically generate the properly formatted provisioning data using perhaps a service in the cloud.

Cloud virtual machine provisioning using virtual storage

Software deployment to server nodes within large-scale networked systems is provided using image-based deployment. A mostly immutable image is provided at a central service and transferred from the central service to the server nodes. The image includes a base image, which is immutable, and a delta image, which is writable and provides role-specific and/or node-specific state to the base portion. When a server node receives an image from the central server, the server node stores the image intact without installation. The server node then runs software directly from the stored image.

Software deployment in large-scale networked systems

Embodiments are directed to implementing rate controls to limit faults detected by timeout and to learning and adjusting an optimal timeout value. In one scenario, a computer system identifies cloud components that have the potential to fail within a time frame that is specified by a timeout value. The computer system establishes a number of components that are allowed to fail during the time frame specified by the timeout value and further determines that the number of component failures within the time frame specified by the timeout value has exceeded the established number of components that are allowed to fail. In response, the computer system increases the timeout value by a specified amount of time to ensure that fewer than or equal to the established number of components fail within the time frame specified by the timeout value.

Implementing rate controls to limit timeout-based faults

A form of multicast, referred to as 'on-demand multicast,' provides a methodology that allows for 'on demand' multicasting of data. On-demand multicast allows clients to join or leave a transmission at any point. There is no transmission session start or end time&#x2014;the session is continuously available, although data is not necessarily continuously transmitted. Data blocks missed by late-joining clients are retransmitted per amalgamated client requests through multiple transmission cycles until all clients that have joined the transmission session receive all content. Once a client has received all data blocks comprising the content for the session, the client may exit the ongoing session.

Reliable multicast with automatic session startup and client backfill support

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Saad Syed