Managing virtual hard drives as blobs
First Claim
1. A computer-implemented method to manage virtual hard drives as blobs in a cloud computing platform, the method comprising:
- creating a blob in a blob store that is exposed as a virtual hard drive to one or more applications, wherein exclusive write access is provided to the blob for an application via a blob lease that expires after a specified time period;
mounting the virtual hard drive;
andmanaging read and write requests to the virtual hard drive, wherein a driver intercepts all I/O requests to the virtual hard drive and reroutes the I/O requests to the blob in the blob store and a snapshot of the blob is created via a blob interface to allow additional applications to concurrently read data stored in the blob, the application writes in the I/O requests are committed to the blob store before acknowledging success back to the application.
2 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
Cloud computing platforms having computer-readable media that perform methods to manage virtual hard drives as blobs are provided. The cloud computing platform includes fabric computers and blob stores. The fabric computers execute virtual machines that implement one or more applications that access virtual hard drives. The data in the virtual hard drives is accessed, via a blob interface, from blobs in the blob stores. The blob stores interface with a driver that translates some application input/output (I/O) requests destined to the virtual hard drives to blob commands when accessing data in the virtual hard drives.
70 Citations
14 Claims
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1. A computer-implemented method to manage virtual hard drives as blobs in a cloud computing platform, the method comprising:
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creating a blob in a blob store that is exposed as a virtual hard drive to one or more applications, wherein exclusive write access is provided to the blob for an application via a blob lease that expires after a specified time period; mounting the virtual hard drive; and managing read and write requests to the virtual hard drive, wherein a driver intercepts all I/O requests to the virtual hard drive and reroutes the I/O requests to the blob in the blob store and a snapshot of the blob is created via a blob interface to allow additional applications to concurrently read data stored in the blob, the application writes in the I/O requests are committed to the blob store before acknowledging success back to the application. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
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7. One or more computer readable media not a signal per se storing instructions to perform a method to manage virtual hard drives as blobs in a cloud computing platform, the method comprising:
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receiving I/O requests for a virtual hard drive from an application executing on a virtual machine in the cloud computing platform; and managing, by a driver, I/O requests to the virtual hard drive, wherein the driver orders overlapping I/O requests to the blob in the blob store, and transmits nonoverlapping I/O requests in parallel to the blobs in the blob store; and updating a local cache on the virtual machine with a write request, wherein the update to the local cache occurs either after an acknowledgement is received from the blob store, or in parallel with a write to the blob store but the update is available after the acknowledgement is received from the blob store. - View Dependent Claims (8, 9, 10)
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11. A cloud computing platform that manages virtual hard drives as blobs, the cloud computing platform comprising:
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fabric computers configured to execute virtual machines that implement applications, which access virtual hard drives to read and write data; and blob stores configured to store blobs that are exposed as virtual hard drives to the applications and the blobs are leased for a specific period of time by the applications that are configured to continuously renew the leases to maintain access the virtual hard drives corresponding to the blobs, wherein different application programming interfaces and semantics enable access to the blobs and virtual hard drives. - View Dependent Claims (12, 13, 14)
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Specification