Architecture for implementing a virtualization environment and appliance
First Claim
1. A system, comprising:
- an appliance for implementing a virtualization system comprising compute components and storage components, the appliance having a plurality of serverboards, in which a respective serverboard corresponds to a single node of a plurality of nodes, wherein the single node comprises a hypervisor, one or more virtual machines, a controller virtual machine and one or more local storage devices, wherein the controller virtual machine runs as a virtual machine above the hypervisor and manages storage and I/O activities for the one or more virtual machines, wherein the appliance is rack mountable and the plurality of serverboards are inserted into the appliance, wherein one or more appliances operatively coupled to one another correspond to the virtualization system;
a plurality of sets of storage units, wherein a set of storage units from the plurality of sets of storage units comprises a local storage device that is locally attached to a corresponding serverboard of a node, and the plurality of sets of storage units comprise a storage cluster that is structured from portions of local storage devices on separate nodes; and
wherein controller virtual machines, from the plurality of nodes in the virtualization system, in communication with each other form a storage pool comprising the plurality of sets of storage units.
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Abstract
An improved architecture is provided which enables significant convergence of the components of a system to implement virtualization. The infrastructure is VM-aware, and permits scaled out converged storage provisioning to allow storage on a per-VM basis, while identifying I/O coming from each VM. The current approach can scale out from a few nodes to a large number of nodes. In addition, the inventive approach has ground-up integration with all types of storage, including solid-state drives. The architecture of the invention provides high availability against any type of failure, including disk or node failures. In addition, the invention provides high performance by making I/O access local, leveraging solid-state drives and employing a series of patent-pending performance optimizations.
513 Citations
22 Claims
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1. A system, comprising:
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an appliance for implementing a virtualization system comprising compute components and storage components, the appliance having a plurality of serverboards, in which a respective serverboard corresponds to a single node of a plurality of nodes, wherein the single node comprises a hypervisor, one or more virtual machines, a controller virtual machine and one or more local storage devices, wherein the controller virtual machine runs as a virtual machine above the hypervisor and manages storage and I/O activities for the one or more virtual machines, wherein the appliance is rack mountable and the plurality of serverboards are inserted into the appliance, wherein one or more appliances operatively coupled to one another correspond to the virtualization system; a plurality of sets of storage units, wherein a set of storage units from the plurality of sets of storage units comprises a local storage device that is locally attached to a corresponding serverboard of a node, and the plurality of sets of storage units comprise a storage cluster that is structured from portions of local storage devices on separate nodes; and wherein controller virtual machines, from the plurality of nodes in the virtualization system, in communication with each other form a storage pool comprising the plurality of sets of storage units. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22)
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Specification