AUTOMATIC OPTIMIZATION FOR VIRTUAL SYSTEMS

• US 20080184225A1
• Filed: 11/27/2007
• Published: 07/31/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 10/17/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Red Hat, Inc. (International Business Machines Corporation)
• Original Assignee: ManageIQ, Inc. (International Business Machines Corporation)
• Inventors: Barenboim, Oleg, Fitzgerald, Joseph
• Granted Patent: US 8,458,695 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 718/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45591 Monitoring or debugging support
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/455 Emulation; Interpretation; Software simulation, e.g. virtualisation or emulation of application or operating system execution engines
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects

Abstract

Techniques are disclosed for controlling and managing virtual machines and other such virtual systems. VM execution approval is based on compliance with policies controlling various aspects of VM. The techniques can be employed to benefit all virtual environments, such as virtual machines, virtual appliances, and virtual applications. For ease of discussion herein, assume that a virtual machine (VM) represents each of these environments. In one particular embodiment, a systems management partition (SMP) is created inside the VM to provide a persistent and resilient storage for management information (e.g., logical and physical VM metadata). The SMP can also be used as a staging area for installing additional content or agentry on the VM when the VM is executed. Remote storage of management information can also be used. The VM management information can then be made available for pre-execution processing, including policy-based compliance testing.

Claims

1. A method for optimizing virtual machines (VMs), comprising:

computing a delta between a pre-execution state of a target VM and a post-execution state of the target VM to determine changes made to the target VM during at least one of pre-execution compliance-based adaptation and execution; and

in response to a change being desirable for permanent use, suggesting and/or deriving a variant of the target VM that permanently includes the desired change.

2. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

in response to an adaptation being undesirable for permanent use, discarding that adaptation.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein suggesting and/or deriving a variant of the target VM includes at least one of suggesting and deriving a VM without previously installed under-utilized applications, thereby conserving license use.

4. The method of claim 1 wherein suggesting and/or deriving a variant of the target VM includes at least one of suggesting and deriving a VM without unauthorized content that is consistently removed by the pre-execution compliance-based adaptation.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein suggesting and/or deriving a variant of the target VM includes at least one of suggesting and deriving a VM that permanently includes security code that is consistently installed by the pre-execution compliance-based adaptation.

6. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

analyzing adaptations of multiple VMs included in a group to determine commonality of adaptations made; and

in response to adaptations that are consistently made to a quorum of the VMs included in the group, suggesting and/or deriving variants of all VMs in the group that permanently include one or more of those adaptations consistently made to a quorum.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein deriving a variant of the target VM includes permanently committing one or more adaptations to the target VM.

8. The method of claim 1 wherein the pre-execution compliance-based adaptation includes applying one or more signature-based compliance policies to one or more signatures associated with the target VM, wherein the VM signatures are generated from at least one of physical and logical metadata associated with the target VM.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein computing a delta between the pre-execution state and the post-execution state comprises:

differencing at least one of VM content metadata and VM content itself; and

capturing changes resulting from the differencing into a storage, so that the changes can then be analyzed.

10. The method of claim 9 wherein the differencing is carried out using content signature based comparisons.

11. The method of claim 10 wherein content signatures used in the comparisons are computed using one or more hashing functions.

12. The method of claim 1 wherein computing a delta between the pre-execution state and the post-execution state comprises:

reading delta data created during VM execution, the delta data indicating VM differences between the pre-execution state and the post-execution state.

13. The method of claim 1 further comprising the preliminary steps of:

getting the pre-execution state of the target VM; and

getting the post-execution state of the target VM.

14. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

computing a delta between a pre-execution state of a target VM execution platform and a post-execution state of the target VM execution platform to determine changes made to the target VM execution platform during at least one of pre-execution compliance-based adaptation and VM execution; and

in response to an execution platform change being desirable for permanent use, suggesting and/or deriving a variant of the target VM execution platform that permanently includes the desired change.

15. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

intercepting a request to at least one of stop or suspend the target VM; and

preventing the target VM from stopping or suspending until the target VM is determined to be compliant with the VM compliance scheme.

16. The method of claim 1 wherein the target VM is a virtual application or a virtual appliance.

17. A system for optimizing virtual machines (VMs), comprising:

a learning module for computing a delta between a pre-execution state of a target VM and a post-execution state of the target VM to determine changes made to the target VM during at least one of pre-execution compliance-based adaptation and execution; and

an optimization module for, in response to a change being desirable for permanent use, suggesting and/or deriving a variant of the target VM that permanently includes the desired change.

18. The system of claim 17 wherein the pre-execution compliance-based adaptation is carried out by an adaptation module for applying one or more signature-based compliance policies to one or more signatures associated with the target VM, wherein the VM signatures are generated from at least one of physical and logical metadata associated with the target VM.

19. The system of claim 17 wherein the learning module is further configured for computing a delta between a pre-execution state of a target VM execution platform and a post-execution state of the target VM execution platform to determine changes made to the target VM execution platform during at least one of pre-execution compliance-based adaptation and VM execution, and the optimization module is further configured for, in response to an execution platform change being desirable for permanent use, suggesting and/or deriving a variant of the target VM execution platform that permanently includes the desired change.

20. One or more machine-readable mediums encoded with instructions, that when executed by one or more processors, cause the processor to carry out a process for optimizing virtual machines (VMs), the process comprising:

computing a delta between a pre-execution state of a target VM and a post-execution state of the target VM to determine changes made to the target VM during at least one of pre-execution compliance-based adaptation and execution; and

in response to a change being desirable for permanent use, suggesting and/or deriving a variant of the target VM that permanently includes the desired change.

21. The one or more machine-readable mediums of claim 20, the process further comprising:

computing a delta between a pre-execution state of a target VM execution platform and a post-execution state of the target VM execution platform to determine changes made to the target VM execution platform during at least one of pre-execution compliance-based adaptation and VM execution; and

in response to an execution platform change being desirable for permanent use, suggesting and/or deriving a variant of the target VM execution platform that permanently includes the desired change.