Applying update to snapshots of virtual machine

• US 10,140,115 B2
• Filed: 04/09/2018
• Issued: 11/27/2018
• Est. Priority Date: 10/28/2014
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Fukui, Yuto, Hayashi, Daisuke, Shioya, Tomohiro
• Primary Examiner(s): Nguyen, Mongbao
• Application Number:
  US15/947,931
• Publication Number:
  US 20180232225A1
• Time in Patent Office: 232 Days
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45562 Creating, deleting, cloning virtual machine instances
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45591 Monitoring or debugging support
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/65 Updates security arrangements therefor G06F21/57
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects

Abstract

For automatically applying update to snapshots of a virtual machine (VM), a cloned virtual machine is created reproducing a state of an existing first snapshot of a virtual machine, a first virtual NIC in the cloned VM is disabled, an update is applied to the cloned VM to which a second virtual NIC has been added, the second virtual NIC is deleted from the cloned VM to which the update has been applied, the first virtual NIC is enabled, and a second snapshot of the cloned VM is generated with the enabled first virtual NIC wherein the second snapshot is associated with the virtual machine.

Claims

1. A computer implemented method for applying an update to a snapshot of a virtual machine executed by a hardware processor, the method comprising:

creating a cloned virtual machine reproducing a state of an existing first snapshot of a virtual machine, wherein the creating the cloned virtual machine further comprises selecting the existing first snapshot of a plurality of existing snapshots based on, at least, a priority associated with the existing first snapshot and a usage frequency for the existing first snapshot;

disabling a first virtual network interface card (NIC) in the cloned virtual machine, wherein the disabling the first virtual NIC comprises disconnecting the first virtual NIC from a network;

adding a second virtual NIC to the cloned virtual machine, wherein the adding the second virtual NIC to the cloned virtual machine further comprises initiating the cloned virtual machine to which the second virtual NIC has been added and assigning an unused internet protocol (IP) address to the second virtual NIC;

applying, via the network, an update to the cloned virtual machine having the added second virtual NIC, wherein the update is applied using the unused IP address assigned to the second virtual NIC and the update comprises a security update to maintain security for the virtual machine and the security update comprises an update of a definition file for security software, wherein the security software is anti-virus software;

deleting the second virtual NIC;

enabling the first virtual NIC; and

generating a snapshot of the updated cloned virtual machine and the first virtual NIC, wherein the snapshot is associated with the virtual machine and the snapshot is a data set in which only information on differences from a directly preceding snapshot is stored.