Storage system for provisioning and storing data to a virtual disk

• US 10,067,722 B2
• Filed: 07/02/2014
• Issued: 09/04/2018
• Est. Priority Date: 07/02/2014
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: CommVault Systems Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Hedvig Inc. (CommVault Systems Incorporated)
• Inventors: Lakshman, Avinash
• Primary Examiner(s): Gossage, Glenn
• Application Number:
  US14/322,813
• Publication Number:
  US 20160004481A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,525 Days
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0605 by facilitating the interaction with a user or administrator
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0631 by allocating resources to storage systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0665 at area level, e.g. provisioning of virtual or logical volumes
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/067 Distributed or networked storage systems, e.g. storage area networks [SAN], network attached storage [NAS]
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0689 Disk arrays, e.g. RAID, JBOD
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45533 Hypervisors; Virtual machine monitors

Abstract

An administrator provisions a virtual disk in a remote storage platform and defines policies for that virtual disk. A virtual machine writes to and reads from the storage platform using any storage protocol. Virtual disk data within a failed storage pool is migrated to different storage pools while still respecting the policies of each virtual disk. Snapshot and revert commands are given for a virtual disk at a particular point in time and overhead is minimal. A virtual disk is cloned utilizing snapshot information and no data need be copied. Any number of Zookeeper clusters are executing in a coordinated fashion within the storage platform, thus increasing overall throughput. A timestamp is generated that guarantees a monotonically increasing counter, even upon a crash of a virtual machine. Any virtual disk has a “hybrid cloud aware” policy in which one replica of the virtual disk is stored in a public cloud.

Claims

1. A method of provisioning a virtual disk within a storage platform of computer nodes, said method comprising:

accessing said storage platform using a computer remote from said storage platform;

selecting a name and a size for said virtual disk;

choosing at least one policy for said virtual disk that is respected by said virtual disk within said storage platform;

selecting a plurality of said computer nodes on which to store metadata of said virtual disk;

storing said virtual disk name, said size and said at least one policy as said metadata on the selected computer nodes;

attaching said virtual disk to a controller virtual machine of a computer server located in a compute farm remote from said storage platform, said computer server including a software application executing within a virtual machine of said computer server different from said controller virtual machine; and

storing an identification of said selected computer nodes at said controller virtual machine of said computer server, whereby said software application of said computer server is able to write into said virtual disk via said controller virtual machine using said identification stored on said controller virtual machine in order to save data into said storage platform after said attaching, and wherein said selected computer nodes may be different from computer nodes where the data of said virtual disk is saved.

2. A method as recited in claim 1 wherein said storage platform is a data center.

3. A method as recited in claim 1 wherein said at least one policy is a replication factor policy, a residence policy, or a replication location policy.

4. A method as recited in claim 1 further comprising:

allocating space for said virtual disk on computer nodes of said storage platform.

5. A method as recited in claim 1 further comprising:

performing said provisioning of said virtual disk without allocating any space on any storage disks of said computer nodes of said storage platform.

6. A method as recited in claim 1 wherein said at least one policy is a hybrid cloud aware policy dictating that at least one replica of any data stored within said virtual disk shall be stored within said storage platform and that at least one replica of said any data stored within said virtual disk shall be stored within a public cloud storage platform.

7. A method as recited in claim 1 further comprising:

writing data to said virtual disk from said software application; and

allocating space on at least one storage disk of a computer node of said storage platform and writing the data written to said virtual disk into said space on said at least one storage disk.

8. A method as recited in claim 1 further comprising:

presenting a user interface window on said remote computer by said management routine, wherein said selecting of the name and size for said virtual disk and said choosing is done via said user interface window.