System and Method for Virtualizing Backup Images

• US 20090222496A1
• Filed: 06/23/2006
• Published: 09/03/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 06/24/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Catalogic Software, Inc.
• Original Assignee: Syncsort Incorporated
• Inventors: Acharya, Soubir, Liu, Peter Chi-Hsiung
• Granted Patent: US 8,346,726 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1451 by selection of backup contents
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1453 using de-duplication of the data
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1456 Hardware arrangements for backup
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1469 Backup restoration techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2074 Asynchronous techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 12/16 Protection against loss of memory contents contains no material, see G06F11/00
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/84 Using snapshots, i.e. a logical point-in-time copy of the data
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0482 Interaction with lists of selectable items, e.g. menus

Abstract

Facility for using images created by backup software to recreate an entire machine as it was at the point in time in the past when the backup was taken. The facility can be extended so as to bring up a set of machines which together serve some logical business function as in a cluster or federated servers, and further extended so that an entire data center may be virtualized from backup images. The virtualized servers provided may serve as an alternate data center standing in case of disaster or to meet maintenance windows achieving low cost Instant Disaster Recovery. A set of virtual machines may stand in for physical machines for a period of time and then resynchronized or re-seeded to physical machines via a combination of bare metal recovery and re-synchronizing from live LXJNs that form the virtual machine disks.

Claims

1. A method for virtualizing a physical machine from a backup image of said physical machine, comprising

a) creating a backup image of said physical machine in a format for a virtual machine image for a virtualization server;

and

b) loading said backup image as a virtual machine image under said virtualization server.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein said backup image is a point-in-time snapshot of said physical machine.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the step of creating said backup of said physical machine comprises

i. taking a base-level snapshot of said physical machine;

ii. storing the snapshot image on a storage device;

iii. taking block-level incremental snapshots of said physical machine, where the incremental snapshots represent only the blocks that have been changed since prior snapshot;

iv. constructing the incremental snapshots in a manner that can be used directly as a mounted storage unit; and

v. saving together with said snapshot images information representing the state of said physical machine at the point-in-time of each snapshot image.

4. The method of claim 1, where the method of loading said backup image comprises

i. selecting a node (or a set of nodes) representing said physical machine from the latest snapshot or any other point in time;

ii. transforming said backup image into a LUN by creating a pseudo-file which presents an envelope on top of said backup image;

iii. reading metadata from a file presented in conjunction with said backup image and using said metadata to issue directives for creating a virtual machine; and

iv. booting said virtual machine from said LUN.

5. The method of claim 4, further comprising maintaining the integrity of said backup image by writing newly created and/or changed data separately.

6. The method of claim 4, further comprising impregnating said LUN with a boot record appropriate for the operating system, and creating partition table jumps and fixing the boot sector of the file system if needed.

7. The method of claim 4, further comprising modifying data and/or configuration on said LUN so that booting from said LUN may succeed.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising

a) running said virtual machine to process new input;

b) restarting said physical machine at a time subsequent to said backup; and

c) synchronizing the data on said physical machine with the data on said virtual machine.

12. The method of claim 4, further comprising copying all blocks in the background from said image to said LUN.

8. A method for virtualizing a plurality of physical machines comprising

a) creating a backup image of each said physical machine in a format for a virtual machine image for a virtualization server;

and

b) loading said backup images as a plurality of virtual machine image under said virtualization server.

9. The method of claim 8, further comprising

a) creating each said backup image as a point-in-time snapshot of the corresponding physical machine;

b) saving together with each such snapshot image information representing the state of the corresponding physical machine at the point-in-time of such snapshot image, in which such state includes the network connections of said physical machine;

c) loading said saved information regarding network connections together with said backup images, and using such information to recreate within said virtualization server the network connections of each such physical machine.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein said plurality of physical machines represent computers in a data center and said method is employed to create a virtualization of the data center.