Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Microsoft Corporation

William L Scheidel

Robert M Fries

Srivatsan Parthasarathy

James P Finnigan

Alan C Shi

Michael L Michael

Ran Kalach

Paul Adrian Oltean

Paul Brandon Luber

Karan Mehra

Dan Teodosiu

David Wortendyke

Nikolaj Skallerud Bjorner

Benjamin A Leis

Joseph A Porkka

Natalia Valeryevna Varava

Jay Paulus

Venkatasubrahmanyam Raman

Richard D Chinn

Robert A Post, Jr

Gilles Zunuino

P Adrian Oltean

Paul B Luber

Benjamin Alan Leis

Deployment and servicing tasks associated with multi-tier, distributed applications, application environments and data centers are automated so that a person does not have to manually perform these tasks. All of the information describing and defining the distributed service is modeled and stored in a re-useable service template that can be used to drive an automated system to programmatically deploy and manage the service over time. Deployment and servicing of a distributed application can be automated using re-useable models that capture hardware and workload definitions. The re-useable models in the form of service templates enable delta-based servicing of the application. The service can be deployed to one or more physical machines, one or more virtual machines or to a combination thereof. A default deployment plan can be customized with instance-specific customizations of service parameters.

Automated deployment and servicing of distributed applications

An application may be modeled as a collection of resource usage. The model allows the application to be elastic so that additional resource usage can be added when needed. Items may be added to and/or removed from applications at any time without regard to the state of the application. Existing items in the application may also be altered at any time regardless of the application state. A set of interfaces are used to manage the resources. The interface allow for the provisioning, configuration, deployment, monitoring and diagnostics of resources in a consistent way.

Runtime-agnostic management of applications

A host server hosting one or more virtual machines can back up host volumes and the one or more virtual machines installed thereon in an application-consistent manner. In one implementation, a host-level requestor instructs a host-level writer to identify which virtual machines qualify for application-consistent backups. The host-level requestor then instructs the host-level writer to initiate virtual machine backups through guest-level requesters in each appropriately-configured virtual machine, wherein the virtual machines create application-consistent backups within the virtual machine volumes. The host-level requester then initiates snapshots of the server volumes on the host-level. The virtual machine-level snapshots can thus be retrieved from within the host-level snapshots of the server volumes.

Creating host-level application-consistent backups of virtual machines

Methods and systems for scanning a virtual machine image. The virtual machine image may be stored as a collection of one or more virtual hard disk files. The virtual machine image may be stored by taking the virtual machine off-line or may be stored by taking a checkpoint of the virtual machine while the virtual machine is on-line. The virtual machine image is rendered to file-system data. Rendering the virtual machine image to file-system data may comprise mounting the virtual machine image's virtual hard disk drives. An anti-malware engine is invoked to scan the exposed file-system data, and data indicative of the scanning may be stored.

Using antimalware technologies to perform offline scanning of virtual machine images

Physical (or prior virtual) machine volumes can be converted to virtual machines at a virtual machine host while the physical machines are running. In one implementation, a volume shadow copy service can be used to create an application (and/or file system)-consistent snapshot of one or more physical machine volumes while the one or more volumes are running. The snapshot data can then be transferred to a mounted virtual hard disk file (dynamic or fixed) at a virtual machine host. Operational information (e.g., boot record, system registry, drivers, devices, configuration preferences, etc.) associated with the virtual hard disk file and the operating system(s) within the virtual machine can then be modified as appropriate to ensure that the corresponding virtual machine is bootable and functional at the virtual machine host. The virtual hard disk file can then be un-mounted, and used as a new virtual machine.

Converting physical machines to virtual machines

Remote differential compression is integrated within applications. Objects are updated between two or more computing devices using remote differential compression (RDC) techniques such that required data transfers are minimized. An algorithm provides enhanced efficiencies for allowing the receiver to locate a set of objects that are similar to the object that needs to be transferred from the sender. Once this set of similar objects has been found, the receiver may reuse any chunks from these objects during the RDC algorithm.

Applications for remote differential compression

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William L Scheidel