US 12,436,788 B2
Efficient mass virtual machine (VM) cloning
Alexander Krits, Austin, TX (US); Pavan Narasimhaprasad, Cedar Park, TX (US); Li Zheng, Palo Alto, CA (US); Ali Reza Alibhai, Richmond Hill (CA); Arunachalam Ramanathan, Union City, CA (US); Sampath Kumar Kilaparthi, San Jose, CA (US); and Nathan Lyle Prziborowski, Eugene, OR (US)
Assigned to VMware LLC, Palo Alto, CA (US)
Filed by VMware LLC, Palo Alto, CA (US)
Filed on Jan. 12, 2022, as Appl. No. 17/574,453.
Prior Publication US 2023/0221977 A1, Jul. 13, 2023
Int. Cl. G06F 9/455 (2018.01)
CPC G06F 9/45558 (2013.01) [G06F 2009/45562 (2013.01); G06F 2009/45583 (2013.01); G06F 2009/45595 (2013.01)] 15 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. On a network environment comprising a management server having a disk pool manager, and a plurality of cluster host environments wherein each cluster host environment comprises a disk pool agent, a method comprising:
receiving, by a management server, a registration request for registering a virtual machine (VM) or VM template as a source for future VM cloning operations, wherein the VM or VM template is associated with a virtual disk, and wherein the registration request includes a content distribution policy specifying one or more datastores in a cluster and a desired number of copies of the virtual disk to be created in a disk pool of each of the one or more datastores;
identifying, by the disk pool manager, a subset of the plurality of host systems in the cluster with access to the one or more datastores; and
transferring, by the disk pool manager, a seed copy of the virtual disk to each of the subset of the plurality of host systems, and
operating the seed copy of the virtual disk by a hardware processor of each respective host system of the subset of the plurality of host systems, wherein operating the seed copy for each subset of host systems includes storing the seed copy in a disk pool of a datastore in the one or more datastores and creates, using the seed copy, a plurality of additional local copies of the virtual disk in the disk pool for the respective host system;
for each disk pool agent:
iteratively comparing, by the respective disk pool agent, a number of available copies in a disk pool, for the respective cluster host environment, to a minimum threshold number specified in a content distribution policy template;
wherein if the number of available copies in a disk pool for the respective cluster host environment is less than a minimum threshold number:
notifying the management server of the identified respective cluster host environments need for additional clones of the seed copy; and
coordinating, by the disk pool manager, for sending of additional clones to the identified cluster host environment from other host environments associated with the one or more data stores.