Virtual Desktop Provisioning via Gold Image Linked Clones
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Service providers face inefficiencies in resource utilization and high availability when providing virtual desktops to multiple tenants due to limitations in sharing server resources, leading to suboptimal allocation and utilization of server computers.
Innovation Solution
A system that dynamically allocates and manages server computers by creating clones of virtual machines from a gold image, allowing rapid provisioning and high availability while ensuring each tenant has dedicated resources, improving utilization and efficiency by sharing server computers across tenants.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If server computers are shared among multiple tenants to improve resource utilization, then productivity increases, but reliability deteriorates due to license restrictions and performance degradation
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates virtual copies (virtual machines) of server computer resources that can be allocated to multiple tenants. Instead of directly sharing physical server resources, the system provisions virtual machine instances that replicate necessary computing capabilities, allowing multiple tenants to access dedicated resource pools while the physical infrastructure remains shared. This resolves the contradiction by providing both high utilization (through shared physical infrastructure) and reliability (through isolated virtual resource pools).
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments server computer resources into separate virtual machine pools, each dedicated to a specific tenant. By dividing the physical server infrastructure into isolated virtual resource segments, the system enables high resource utilization through shared underlying hardware while maintaining reliability through tenant-specific resource isolation. Each tenant receives guaranteed resource allocation within their segmented pool, preventing performance degradation from multi-tenant sharing.
2Reliability
If server computers are dedicated to single tenants to ensure reliability and performance, then reliability improves, but productivity deteriorates due to suboptimal allocation
Solution Approach 1:
The patent makes physical server computers multi-functional by hosting multiple virtual machine pools simultaneously. Each physical server can serve multiple tenants through virtualization, allowing the same hardware infrastructure to fulfill multiple specialized functions. This resolves the contradiction by enabling dedicated resource pools for each tenant (ensuring reliability) while the underlying physical infrastructure serves universal purposes across multiple tenants (improving productivity).
Solution Approach 2:
The patent merges multiple tenant-specific virtual resource pools onto shared physical server infrastructure. By combining the resource needs of multiple tenants on unified physical hardware through virtualization, the system achieves both dedicated resource allocation (for reliability) and consolidated resource management (for productivity). The merging occurs at the virtualization layer while maintaining logical separation of tenant resources.
Data Source
AI summary
A server computer can be quickly allocated to and made ready for use by users of a tenant by adding and starting, on that server computer, copies of a process implementing the tenant's virtual machine, based on a gold image virtual machine for that tenant. The gold image virtual machine also has an associated gold image virtual disk. The virtual machines on the server computer are associated with virtual disks that are linked clones based on the gold image virtual disk, such as linked clones of a replica of the gold image virtual disk. Each virtual machine for a tenant on the new server computer also is added to the tenant computer network. Server computers for multiple tenants can be grouped into a cluster, and can use anti-affinity rules to limit instantiation of virtual machines of each tenant only on server computers dedicated to the tenant.