METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR PROVIDING HYPERVISOR LEVEL DATA SERVICES FOR SERVER VIRTUALIZATION

• US 20110231841A1
• Filed: 03/03/2011
• Published: 09/22/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 03/17/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Company)
• Original Assignee: Zerto Incorporated
• Inventors: Kedem, Ziv
• Granted Patent: US 10,649,799 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 718/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1471 involving logging of persistent data for recovery
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/4557 Distribution of virtual machine instances; Migration and load balancing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45579 I/O management, e.g. providing access to device drivers or storage
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45595 Network integration; Enabling network access in virtual machine instances
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2209/542 Intercept
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0619 in relation to data integrity, e.g. data losses, bit errors
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0653 Monitoring storage devices or 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
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/545 where tasks reside in different layers, e.g. user- and kernel-space

Abstract

A hypervisor virtual server system, including a plurality of virtual servers, a plurality of virtual disks that are read from and written to by the plurality of virtual servers, a physical disk, an I/O backend coupled with the physical disk and in communication with the plurality of virtual disks, which reads from and writes to the physical disk, a tapping driver in communication with the plurality of virtual servers, which intercepts I/O requests made by any one of said plurality of virtual servers to any one of said plurality of virtual disks, and a virtual data services appliance, in communication with the tapping driver, which receives the intercepted I/O write requests from the tapping driver, and that provides data services based thereon.

Claims

1. A hypervisor virtual server system, comprising:

a plurality of virtual servers;

a plurality of virtual disks that are read from and written to by said plurality of virtual servers;

a physical disk;

an I/O backend coupled with said physical disk and in communication with said plurality of virtual disks, which reads from and writes to said physical disk;

a tapping driver in communication with said plurality of virtual servers, which intercepts I/O requests made by any one of said plurality of virtual servers to any one of said plurality of virtual disks; and

a virtual data services appliance, in communication with said tapping driver, which receives the intercepted I/O requests from said tapping driver, and which provides data services based thereon.

2. The hypervisor virtual server system of claim 1, further comprising a journal manager in communication with said virtual data services appliance, which stores intercepted I/O write requests as journal entries in a virtual disk.

3. The hypervisor virtual server system of claim 2, further comprising a hash generator in communication with said virtual data services appliance and with said journal manager, for generating hash values of the intercepted I/O write requests, and wherein said journal manager stores the generated hash values.

4. The hypervisor virtual server system of claim 1, further comprising a TCP transmitter in communication with said virtual data services appliance, which transmits the intercepted I/O requests to a remote virtual data services appliance.

5. The hypervisor virtual system of claim 1, further comprising a data analyzer in communication with said virtual data services appliance, which analyzes an intercepted I/O request and infers therefrom the data state of the virtual server that made the I/O request.

6. A method for providing data services within a hypervisor virtual server system, comprising:

intercepting I/O requests from any one of a plurality of virtual servers to one of a plurality of virtual disks; and

sending intercepted I/O write requests to a virtual data services appliance that provides hypervisor data services.

7. The method of claim 6 further comprising journaling the intercepted I/O requests.

8. The method of claim 7 further comprising generating a hash value for the intercepted I/O requests, and wherein said journaling comprises journaling the generated hash values.

9. The method of claim 6 further comprising analyzing an intercepted I/O request inferring therefrom the data state of the virtual server that made the I/O request.

10. The method of claim 6 further comprising sending the intercepted I/O requests to a remote computer, thereby providing replication for said plurality of virtual servers.