Administering virtual machines in a distributed computing environment

• US 9,606,824 B2
• Filed: 04/28/2014
• Issued: 03/28/2017
• 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.
• Primary Examiner(s): Bates, Kevin
• Assistant Examiner(s): Kim, Dae
• Application Number:
  US14/263,014
• Publication Number:
  US 20150312326A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,065 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 2009/45595 Network integration; Enabling network access in virtual machine instances
• 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: H04L 41/12 Discovery or management of network topologies
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/122 of virtualised topologies, e.g. software-defined networks [SDN] or network function virtualisation [NFV]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/40 using virtualisation of network functions or resources, e.g. SDN or NFV entities
• 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 which each execute a VMM, where each VMM supports execution of one or more VMs, administering the 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 gather operation, including: sending, by the root VMM, to other VMMs in the tree topology, a request to retrieve one or more VMs supported by the other VMMs; pausing, by the other VMMs, each VM requested to be retrieved; and providing, by the other VMMs to the root VMM, the VMs requested to be retrieved.

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;

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

sending, by the root VMM, to other VMMs in the tree topology, a request to retrieve one or more VMs supported by the other VMMs, wherein the VMs requested to be retrieved are instances of an identical VM;

pausing, by the other VMMs, each VM requested to be retrieved; and

providing, by the other VMMs to the root VMM, the VMs requested to be retrieved and

performing one of;

executing by the root VMM, upon receipt, the provided VMs and not resuming execution of the provided VMs by the other VMMs, and

storing by the root VMM, upon receipt of the provided VMs, the provided VMs without executing the provided VMs.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein executing the gather operation further comprises executing a gatherv operation and providing the VMs requested to be retrieved further comprises providing, by at least one of the other VMMs, a different number of VMs than another of the other VMMs.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

after providing the VMs, not resuming execution of the provided VMs by the VMMs other than the root.

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

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

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

7. 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.

8. The method of claim 7, wherein one of the plurality of data communications networks comprises a multi-dimensional, point-to-point network.

9. The method of claim 7, wherein one of the plurality of data communications networks comprises a global combining network.