FAULT TOLERANT APPLICATION STORAGE VOLUMES FOR ENSURING APPLICATION AVAILABILITY AND PREVENTING DATA LOSS USING FORKING TECHNIQUES

• US 20180165170A1
• Filed: 03/20/2017
• Published: 06/14/2018
• Est. Priority Date: 12/14/2016
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Omnissa, LLC
• Original Assignee: VMware, Inc. (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Inventors: HEGDAL, GURURAJA, SANKAR, PRASANNA, M.S., MARICHETTY
• Granted Patent: US 10,210,061 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1446 Point-in-time backing up or restoration of persistent data
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1482 by means of middleware or OS functionality
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2069 Management of state, configuration or failover
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2094 Redundant storage or storage space G06F11/2056 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/805 Real-time
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/815 Virtual
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/82 Solving problems relating to consistency
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/60 Software deployment
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45545 Guest-host, i.e. hypervisor is an application program itself, e.g. VirtualBox
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/4843 by program, e.g. task dispatcher, supervisor, operating system

Abstract

A fault tolerant system is described for deploying an application contained in an application storage volume, which may be a virtual disk, on a virtual machine (VM) in a remote desktop environment. The application can be executed on the VM after mounting the virtual disk. A backup of the virtual disk is produced by cloning the virtual disk to a different storage device than the location of the primary virtual disk. In some embodiments, if the primary virtual disk fails during execution of the application, the application is suspended, redirected to the backup virtual disk, and resumed from the backup virtual disk. In other embodiments, if the primary virtual disk fails during execution of the application, a child process is spun off from the parent process using forking techniques, the child process is directed to the backup virtual disk, and the application is resumed from the backup virtual disk.

Claims

1. A method for fault tolerant delivery of an application to a virtual machine (VM) being executed by a server in a remote desktop environment using application storage volumes, comprising:

delivering the application to the VM by attaching a primary application storage volume (ASV) containing components of the application to the VM;

cloning the primary ASV to create a backup ASV;

executing the application on the VM from the primary ASV;

monitoring the primary ASV to detect failures;

detecting a failure of the primary ASV;

in response to the detecting the failure of the primary ASV, forking a child application process from a parent application process of the application;

attaching the backup ASV to the VM;

directing the child application process to the backup ASV; and

resuming the application with the child application process from the backup ASV.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the child application process is assigned a different process identifier (ID) from the parent application process.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising suspending the parent application process once the child application process is created.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the primary ASV is stored on a first storage device and the backup ASV is stored in a second storage device separate from the first storage device.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the child application process inherits an identical memory state of the application to the parent application process.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the monitoring the primary ASV comprises at least one of:

employing a polling technique for detecting when there is a problem accessing a storage device on which the primary ASV is located;

or

monitoring information retrieved from the primary ASV during runtime and ensuring that the retrieved information is consistent with what information is expected.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the failure of the primary ASV is detected before the application is able to detect the failure.

8. A computing device for fault tolerant delivery of an application to a virtual machine (VM) being executed by a server in a remote desktop environment using application storage volumes, comprising:

at least one processor; and

memory including instructions that, when executed by the at least one processor, cause the computing device to perform the steps of;

delivering the application to the VM by attaching a primary application storage volume (ASV) containing components of the application to the VM;

cloning the primary ASV to create a backup ASV;

executing the application on the VM from the primary ASV;

monitoring the primary ASV to detect failures;

detecting a failure of the primary ASV;

in response to the detecting the failure of the primary ASV, forking a child application process from a parent application process of the application;

attaching the backup ASV to the VM;

directing the child application process to the backup ASV; and

resuming the application with the child application process from the backup ASV.

9. The computing device of claim 8, wherein the child application process is assigned a different process identifier (ID) from the parent application process.

10. The computing device of claim 8, wherein the memory further includes instructions that when executed by the at least one processor, cause the computing device to perform the steps of:

suspending the parent application process once the child application process is created.

11. The computing device of claim 8, wherein the primary ASV is stored on a first storage device and the backup ASV is stored in a second storage device separate from the first storage device.

12. The computing device of claim 8, wherein the child application process inherits an identical memory state of the application to the parent application process.

13. The computing device of claim 8, wherein the monitoring the primary ASV comprises at least one of:

employing a polling technique for detecting when there is a problem accessing a storage device on which the primary ASV is located;

or

monitoring information retrieved from the primary ASV during runtime and ensuring that the retrieved information is consistent with what information is expected.

14. The computing device of claim 8, wherein the failure of the primary ASV is detected before the application is able to detect the failure.

15. A non-transitory computer readable storage medium for fault tolerant delivery of an application to a virtual machine (VM) being executed by a server in a remote desktop environment using application storage volumes, comprising one or more sequences of instructions, the instructions when executed by one or more processors causing the one or more processors to execute the operations of:

delivering the application to the VM by attaching a primary application storage volume (ASV) containing components of the application to the VM;

cloning the primary ASV to create a backup ASV;

executing the application on the VM from the primary ASV;

monitoring the primary ASV to detect failures;

detecting a failure of the primary ASV;

in response to the detecting the failure of the primary ASV, forking a child application process from a parent application process of the application;

attaching the backup ASV to the VM;

directing the child application process to the backup ASV; and

resuming the application with the child application process from the backup ASV.

16. The non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 15, wherein the child application process is assigned a different process identifier (ID) from the parent application process.

17. The non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 15, further comprising instructions that when executed by the one or more processors cause the one or more processors to execute the operations of:

suspending the parent application process once the child application process is created.

18. The non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 15, wherein the primary ASV is stored on a first storage device and the backup ASV is stored in a second storage device separate from the first storage device.

19. The non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 15, wherein the child application process inherits an identical memory state of the application to the parent application process.

20. The non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 15, wherein the monitoring the primary ASV comprises at least one of:

employing a polling technique for detecting when there is a problem accessing a storage device on which the primary ASV is located;

or

monitoring information retrieved from the primary ASV during runtime and ensuring that the retrieved information is consistent with what information is expected.