Methods and systems for concurrently taking snapshots of a plurality of virtual machines

Abstract

Techniques are described herein which minimize the impact of virtual machine snapshots on the performance of virtual machines and hypervisors. In the context of a volume snapshot which may involve (i) taking virtual machine snapshots of all virtual machines associated with the volume, (ii) taking the volume snapshot, and (iii) removing all the virtual machine snapshots, multiple virtual machine snapshots may be created in parallel. In the process of creating virtual machine snapshots, a storage system may determine which snapshots to create in parallel. The storage system may also prioritize snapshots from certain hypervisors in order to avoid the problem of 'starvation', in which busy hypervisors prevent less busy hypervisors from creating snapshots. The techniques described herein, while mainly described in the context of snapshot creation, are readily applied to snapshot removal.