Abstract:
A disclosed method includes distinguishing static and dynamic persistent data, copying the static persistent data at the source data store to the destination data store on a basis of frequencies of updates, copying the dynamic persistent data to the destination data store, updating a bitmap data structure during the copying of the dynamic persistent data to indicate which blocks of the dynamic persistent data have been modified during the copying step, identifying the blocks that have been modified during the copying step using the bitmap data structure, and iteratively copying the identified blocks to the destination data store. The method may further include determining when the number of the identified blocks is below a predetermined threshold and suspending the virtual machine prior to the next copying step.
Abstract:
Memory pages that are allocated to a memory consumer and continue to be accessed by the memory consumer are included in a free list, so that they may be immediately allocated to another memory consumer as needed during the course of normal operation without preserving the original contents of the memory page. When a memory page in the free list is accessed to perform a read, a generation number associated with the memory page is compared with a stored copy. If the two match, the read is performed on the memory page. If the two do not match, the read is not performed on the memory page.
Abstract:
A method for transferring guest physical memory from a source host to a destination host during live migration of a virtual machine (VM) involves (a) transmitting pages of the guest physical memory from the source host to the destination host over a network connection, (b) transferring state information from the source host to the destination host, (c) while performance benefits regarding continued access to the guest physical memory on the source host persist, using the transferred state information to run the VM on the destination host in place of running the VM on the source host, and (d) while the VM is running on the destination host, writing pages of the guest physical memory from the source host to a shared datastore such that the destination host can retrieve the written guest physical pages from the shared datastore.
Abstract:
Memory pages that are allocated to a memory consumer and continue to be accessed by the memory consumer are included in a free list, so that they may be immediately allocated to another memory consumer as needed during the course of normal operation without preserving the original contents of the memory page. When a memory page in the free list is accessed to perform a read, a generation number associated with the memory page is compared with a stored copy. If the two match, the read is performed on the memory page. If the two do not match, the read is not performed on the memory page.