Vmware, Inc.

Yuen-Lin Tan

Satyam B Vaghani

Haripriya Rajagopal

Abhishek Rai

Daniel J Scales

Dragan Stancevic

Described herein is technology for, among things, a distributed transaction system. The distributed transaction system includes a number of computing entities and a data storage unit in communication with the computing entities. The data storage unit is operable to store a file system that is accessible by the computing entities. The data storage unit is also operable to store a number of transaction journals corresponding to respective computing entities. The transaction journals describe transactions of the computing entities on the file system. A particular computing entity is operable to maintain a respective transaction journal without communicating with the other computing entities.

Distributed transaction system

A namespace is provided in a file system that employs logical volumes. With the namespace, the file system can withstand data storage units going offline without compromising accessibility of the files in the data storage units that remain online. The files in the online data storage units remain accessible through the use of path lookup tables that are stored in the online data storage units.

Computer file system with path lookup tables

A manager program for managing virtual machines includes a process which receives a notification message indicating an occurrence of an event affecting a data storage unit in a data storage system that supports a shared file system. The notification message might have come from a virtual machine host or resulted from a hardware reconfiguration. The manager program then determines whether another virtual machine host is sharing the data storage unit. The manager program might make this determination by polling each of the virtual machine hosts it manages or by checking information previously collected and stored in a database. If another virtual machine host is sharing the data storage unit, the manager program sends a refresh message to that virtual machine host that causes the virtual machine host to update information relating to the data storage unit in a cache associated with the virtual machine host.

Concurrency control in a file system shared by application hosts

In a file system shared by multiple servers, reservation of a data storage unit such as a LUN of a disk array to acquire locks in order to commit a transaction acting on data stored in the data storage unit is deferred until the transaction is completed in RAM and the locks can be acquired in parallel during a single instance of reserving the data storage unit.

Optimistic locking method and system for committing transactions on a file system

A method, system and program code for implementing distributed locks to be maintained through the use of on disk heartbeats. An instance of a node need only maintain a single heartbeat for all locks associated with the node and all of its processes. The node updates its heartbeat by accessing common storage, either virtual or physical, and updating a timestamp value in its heartbeat within a predetermined time interval, otherwise the heartbeat becomes stale. Expired heartbeats can be cleared or broken to allow redistribution of any locks associated therewith. The inventive technique may be implemented in a traditional computer environment or in a fully or partially virtualized environment and requires no use of an IP network or a separate network based lock manager.

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Pacifica, CA, United States of America

Yuen-Lin Tan