On-demand provisioning of computer resources in physical/virtual cluster environments

• US 20080126834A1
• Filed: 08/31/2006
• Published: 05/29/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 08/31/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Dell Products LP (Dell Technologies Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Dell Products LP (Dell Technologies Inc.)
• Inventors: Singh, Sumankumar, Sankaran, Ananda C., Vasudevan, Bharath
• Granted Patent: US 7,814,364 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 714/4
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1484 involving virtual machines
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2038 with a single idle spare processing component
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2046 where the redundant components share persistent storage G06F11/2043 takes precedence

Abstract

A server cluster comprises a physical node and a virtual host node. The physical node includes an active node running an application. The virtual host node includes an inactive virtual node. The virtual node is activated upon failure of the active node and the application is failed over to the virtual node.

Claims

1. A server cluster comprising:

a physical node including an active node running an application; and

a virtual host node including an inactive virtual node, wherein the virtual node is activated upon failure of the active node and the application is failed over to the virtual node.

2. The server cluster of claim 1, wherein the physical node includes a plurality of active nodes.

3. The server cluster of claim 1, wherein the virtual host node includes a plurality of inactive virtual nodes.

4. The server cluster of claim 1, wherein the physical node includes a plurality of active nodes associated with a plurality of inactive virtual nodes on the virtual host node.

5. The server cluster of claim 4, wherein each virtual node includes a hardware and software operating environment of the associated active node.

6. The server cluster of claim 1, further comprising a cluster service on the virtual host node.

7. The server cluster of claim 1, further comprising a cluster service on the virtual node.

8. The server cluster of claim 1, further comprising a cluster service on the active node.

9. A server cluster comprising:

a physical node including a plurality of active nodes each running an application; and

a virtual host node including a plurality of inactive virtual nodes, each inactive virtual node corresponding to an active node, wherein each virtual node is activated upon failure of a corresponding active node.

10. The server cluster of claim 9, wherein each virtual node includes a hardware and software operating environment of the corresponding active node.

11. The server cluster of claim 9, further comprising a cluster service on the virtual host node.

12. The server cluster of claim 9, further comprising a cluster service on the virtual node.

13. The server cluster of claim 9, further comprising a cluster service on the active node.

14. A method for provisioning a virtual machine in a server cluster, the method comprising:

providing a physical node including an active node running an application;

providing a virtual host node including an inactive virtual node;

activating the virtual node upon failure of the active node; and

failing over the application to the virtual node.

15. The method of claim 14, wherein the physical node includes a plurality of active nodes.

16. The method of claim 14, wherein the virtual host node includes a plurality of inactive virtual nodes.

17. The method of claim 14, wherein the physical node includes a plurality of active nodes associated with a plurality of inactive virtual nodes on the virtual host node.

18. The method of claim 17, wherein each virtual node includes a hardware and software operating environment of the associated active node.

19. The method of claim 14, further comprising providing a cluster service on the virtual host node.

20. The method of claim 14, further comprising providing a cluster service on the virtual node.