International Business Machines Corporation

Vasanth Bala

Todd W Mummert

Darrell Christopher Reimer

Glenn S Ammons

Bowen L Alpern

Xiaolan Zhang

Lakshminarayanan Renganarayana

Arun Thomas

Praveen Jayachandran

Akshat Verma

Canturk Isci

Sastry Duri

Kamal Bhattacharya

Joshua S Auerbach

Marcel Schlatter

Thomas V Frauenhofer

Jobi George

Michael A Pigott

Thomas Diethelm

Ea-Ee Jan

Giovanni Pacifici

Johannes Christiaan Laffra

Mark N Wegman

Hao Chen

Michael Joseph Spreitzer

Jian Yin

Balachandar Rajaraman

James Arthur Lindeman

Sahil Suneja

Niyu Ge

Michel Imhasly

Wolfgang O H Richter

Mona Attariyan

Methods according to the present disclosure include: creating a representative profile from at least one change profile with an identifying tag from a repository, the representative profile including fewer than all possible changes to a system from an event; creating a candidate profile for a first candidate system, not flagged as similar or dissimilar, from the plurality of systems, wherein the candidate profile includes fewer than all changes to the first candidate system from the event; calculating at least one difference between the representative profile and the candidate profile; where the at least one difference is not within at least one threshold, flagging the first candidate system as dissimilar; and where the at least one difference is within the at least one threshold, flagging the first candidate system as similar, associating the identifying tag with the candidate profile, and adding the candidate profile to the repository.

Creating knowledge base of similar systems from plurality of systems

A mechanism is provided in a data processing system for monitoring a virtual machine in a distributed computing system. An out-of-virtual machine monitor receives, via an out-of-band path, disk and memory state data of the virtual machine exposed in a hypervisor hosting the virtual machine. The out-of-virtual machine monitor interprets logical information from the virtual machine disk and memory state data. The out-of-virtual machine monitor parses the logical information to extract related system or log information for a monitoring endpoint. The out-of-virtual machine monitor translates the system or log information to a standard format expected by the monitoring endpoint. The out-of-virtual machine monitor forwards a monitoring data stream to the monitoring endpoint.

Always-on monitoring in the cloud

During a process of migrating a source system into a standardized virtual environment, virtual machine instances of the source system executing in a hypervisor are snapshotted as virtual machine images in an operational repository of the hypervisor. The virtual machine images in the operational repository are short-term snapshots. From time to time during the migration process, long-term snapshots of the source system are created by checking given ones of the virtual machine images from the hypervisor operational repository into an image library as image objects.

Use of snapshots to reduce risk in migration to a standard virtualized environment

In an approach for detecting one or more applications in a VM, one or more processors establish a time duration. One or more processors detect two or more files, each file in the two or more files having a time stamp time that differs from a last modified time stamp time of at least one other file in the two or more files by no more than the time duration. One or more processors record an identifier for each file of the two or more files, a location, a name, and a last modified time stamp time of each file of the two or more files. One or more processors map the two or more files to an application installed on the VM.

Application discovery in virtual machines using temporal clustering of installation files

Aspects of the present invention provide a solution for passively monitoring a computer system. In an embodiment, a read-only target is created based on the configuration of the virtual server disk used by the virtual server to access the storage associated therewith. This read-only target can be used to expose the virtual server disk for access by a monitoring crawler. Using the read-only target, a monitoring crawler can acquire a set of features regarding the virtual server from the virtual server disk. One or more of this set of features can be analyzed to perform passive monitoring of the virtual server.

Passive monitoring of virtual systems using agent-less, near-real-time indexing

Aspects of the present invention provide a solution for passively monitoring a computer system. In an embodiment, an indexing agent operates on a physical server having a plurality of virtual servers. The indexing agent has a framework having a plurality of indexing layers. Each of these indexing layers is adapted to index a virtual server along a different abstraction level to extract abstraction level features indicative of changes in the virtual server. Further, each of the indexing layers has an application programming interface, which is adapted to receive one or more external indexing modules to be plugged into the framework. Each indexing module is adapted to provide instructions to the indexing agent while the indexing layer to which it is plugged is indexing the associated abstraction level of the virtual machine.

Passive monitoring of virtual systems using extensible indexing

Aspects of the present invention provide a solution for creating a snapshot of a virtual server. In an embodiment, a first write storage is created in response to a snapshot request. For each write from the virtual server to primary storage that is the first write of that particular data block since the snapshot request, the data that resided in the data block previous to the write is copied from the primary storage to the first write storage.

Minimally disruptive virtual machine snapshots

A composite software stack is distributed as a virtual appliance. A new virtual appliance is published by obtaining a parent virtual appliance; configuring the new virtual appliance; obtaining file level differences between the parent virtual appliance and the new virtual appliance; and publishing the new virtual appliance as a patch comprising the file level differences relative to the parent virtual appliance. The file level differences comprise additions, deletions and/or modifications to the parent virtual appliance. An update to a given virtual appliance can be published as a fix pack, wherein the fix pack comprises file level differences relative to the given virtual appliance. An end user obtains a desired virtual appliance by selecting the desired virtual appliance; obtaining metadata for the desired virtual appliance comprising an identifier of a patch file and a parent virtual appliance; and applying the patch file to the parent virtual appliance to get a modified virtual appliance.

Method and apparatus for distributing a composite software stack as a virtual machine image

Aspects of the present invention provide a tool for analyzing and remediating an update-related failure. In an embodiment, a failure state of a computer system that has been arrived at as a result of an update is captured. A semantic diff that includes the difference between the failure state and at least one of an original state or a completion state is then computed. This semantic diff is transformed into a feature vector format. Then the transformed semantic diff is analyzed to determine a remediation for the update. Failure and/or resolution signatures can be constructed using the semantic diff and contextual data, and these signatures can be used in comparison and analysis of failures and resolutions.

Systematic failure remediation

A method for managing a virtual machine image includes receiving a request to change a package configuration of a machine, processing an image action received in the request, wherein the processing the image action received includes, opening the image action with associated action inputs, comparing the opened image action inputs with inputs associated with action instances in a database, determining whether the compared opened image action inputs match the inputs associated with action instances, retrieving from the database, image difference data associated with the image action responsive to determining that the compared opened image action inputs match the inputs associated with action instances in the database, and applying the image difference data to an image to transform the image, determining whether each image action in the request has been processed and processing a second image action responsive to determining that each image action has not been processed.

Scalable package management for virtual-machine images

A novel method is disclosed for capturing an installed state of a conventional application and converting the captured state into a virtual application. The novel method starts with a bare machine in a known state, preferably soon after the OS was installed. Installation scripts are used to install one or more software applications along with required components and dependencies. Other artifacts can be added and configured such as files, trees, directories, entries, data, values, among others. These also may include updates to various system databases, such as the Windows registry in which certain metadata is stored. The installed applications are tested and verified to work as desired. Undesired artifacts can be deleted manually or removed by the OS. The state of the virtual machine with the installed applications is captured. The installed applications can be tested on the frozen virtual machine. If the user determines that the installed applications are working properly, a virtual machine image is prepared and then written out. The resulting output is a new populated virtual application container that encapsulates the applications installed and configured by the user. If the user determines that one or more installed applications do not work properly during testing, then the frozen virtual machine can be unfrozen and any deficiencies corrected. The virtual machine image is stored as a launch document and a set of shards. The virtual machine image represents the state of the virtual machine along with the installed applications at the time the preparation virtual machine was frozen.

Creating an application virtual machine image by isolating installation artifacts in shadow area

An information processing system includes a preparation machine with an installed image; an execution machine on which the installed image is virtually installed; and a virtualizer for virtualizing the installed image on the execution machine to produce a virtually installed image by using a hierarchy of selective virtualizers, wherein the virtualizing is selective such that not all operations of the executing software of the installed image at any particular level are virtualized.

Simplifying the deployment and serviceability of commercial software environments

Methods and apparatus are provided for distributing a composite software stack as a virtual appliance. A new virtual appliance is published by obtaining a parent virtual appliance; configuring the new virtual appliance; obtaining file level differences between the parent virtual appliance and the new virtual appliance; and publishing the new virtual appliance as a patch comprising the file level differences relative to the parent virtual appliance. The file level differences comprise one or more of additions, deletions and modifications to the parent virtual appliance. An update to a given virtual appliance can be published as a fix pack, wherein the fix pack comprises file level differences relative to the given virtual appliance. An end user obtains a desired virtual appliance is obtained (for example, from a library of virtual appliances) by selecting the desired virtual appliance; obtaining metadata for the desired virtual appliance comprising an identifier of a patch file and a parent virtual appliance; and applying the patch file to the parent virtual appliance to get a modified virtual appliance.

Growing community of inventors

Rye, NY, United States of America

Vasanth Bala