ADMINISTERING VIRTUAL MACHINES IN A DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT

• US 20150312109A1
• Filed: 04/28/2014
• Published: 10/29/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 04/24/2014
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: ARCHER, CHARLES J., BLOCKSOME, MICHAEL A., CAREY, JAMES E., SANDERS, PHILIP J.
• Granted Patent: US 9,678,777 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/4557 Distribution of virtual machine instances; Migration and load balancing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45575 Starting, stopping, suspending or resuming virtual machine instances
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45595 Network integration; Enabling network access in virtual machine instances
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2209/5017 Task decomposition
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/4856 resumption being on a different machine, e.g. task migration, virtual machine migration G06F9/5088 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/5027 the resource being a machine, e.g. CPUs, Servers, Terminals
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/5066 Algorithms for mapping a plurality of inter-dependent sub-tasks onto a plurality of physical CPUs mappping at compile time, see G06F8/451
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/5077 Logical partitioning of resources; Management or configuration of virtualized resources specific details on emulation or internal functioning of virtual machines G06F9/455
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5054 Automatic deployment of services triggered by the service manager, e.g. service implementation by automatic configuration of network components
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/10 in which an application is distributed across nodes in the network software deployment G06F8/60; multiprogramming arrangements G06F9/46
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1014 based on the content of a request
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/51 Discovery or management thereof, e.g. service location protocol [SLP] or web services

Abstract

In a distributed computing environment that includes hosts that execute a VMM, with each VMM supporting execution of one or more VMs, administering VMs may include: assigning, by a VMM manager, the VMMs of the distributed computing environment to a logical tree topology, including assigning one of the VMMs as a root VMM of the tree topology; and executing, amongst the VMMs of the tree topology, a scatter operation, including: pausing, by the root VMM one or more executing VMs; storing, by the root VMM in a buffer, a plurality of VMs to scatter amongst the other VMMs of the tree topology; and sending, by the root VMM, to each of the other VMMs of the tree topology a different one of the VMs stored in the buffer.

Claims

1. A method of administering a plurality of virtual machines (‘

VMs’

) in a distributed computing environment, the distributed computing environment comprising a plurality of hosts, one or more of the hosts executing a virtual machine monitor (‘

VMM’

), each VMM supporting execution of one or more VMs, the method comprising;

assigning, by a VMM manager, the VMMs of the distributed computing environment to a logical tree topology, including assigning one of the VMMs as a root VMM of the tree topology; and

executing, amongst the VMMs of the tree topology, a scatter operation, including;

pausing, by the root VMM one or more executing VMs;

storing, by the root VMM in a buffer, a plurality of VMs to scatter amongst the other VMMs of the tree topology; and

sending, by the root VMM, to each of the other VMMs of the tree topology a different one of the VMs stored in the buffer.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein executing the scatter operation further comprises executing a scattery operation and sending to each of the other VMMs of the tree topology a different one of the VMs stored in the buffer further comprises sending an unequal number of VMs to at least two VMMs.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

executing, upon receipt by the other VMMs, the transferred VMs.

4. The method of claim 3, further comprising:

after transfer of the VMs, not resuming execution of the paused VMs by the root VMM.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

storing, upon receipt by the other VMMs, the transferred VMs without executing the transferred VMs.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein executing the scatter operation further comprises executing the scatter operation periodically at predefined intervals without user intervention.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein executing the scatter operation further comprises executing the scatter operation on-demand responsive to a user request.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein executing the scatter operation further comprises executing the scatter operation, automatically without user intervention, in dependence upon an execution policy and responsive to an event specified in the execution policy.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the distributed computing environment comprises a parallel computer, the parallel computer comprising a plurality of compute nodes, each of the compute nodes comprising one of the plurality of hosts and executing at least one of the VMMs, each compute node further comprising a plurality of communications adapters, each communications adapter configured to couple the compute node to other compute nodes for data communications and to one of a plurality of data communications networks.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein one of the plurality of data communications networks comprises a multi-dimensional, point-to-point network.

11. The method of claim 9, wherein one of the plurality of data communications networks comprises a global combining network.

12-20. -20. (canceled)