VM Volume Snapshot Mapping for Granular Virtual Machine Recovery
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional methods for protecting and restoring virtual machines in virtual environments involve taking backups of entire vVol datastores, which is inefficient and consumes significant storage space, making it difficult to restore specific virtual machines.
Innovation Solution
The solution involves taking consistency group snapshots of storage volumes that store virtual machine files, ensuring data consistency, and creating a snapshot of only the relevant volumes used by a specific virtual machine, thereby optimizing storage usage and enabling efficient restoration.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If backups of entire vVol datastores are taken to protect virtual machines, then data protection is achieved, but storage space consumption increases significantly and restoration of specific virtual machines becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the backup process by creating separate snapshots for individual virtual machines rather than backing up the entire vVol datastore. Each virtual machine gets its own snapshot, allowing selective protection and restoration without requiring full datastore backups, thus reducing overall storage space consumption while maintaining data protection for specific VMs.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts the backup operation from the entire datastore level down to the individual virtual machine level. By taking snapshots at the VM level within the datastore, the system extracts only the necessary data portions needed for protection, eliminating the need to backup and store redundant data from other VMs in the same datastore.
2Reliability
If backups of entire vVol datastores are taken to protect virtual machines, then data protection is achieved, but restoration of specific virtual machines becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the restoration process by enabling individual virtual machine restoration from separate snapshots. Administrators can restore specific VMs by selecting their corresponding snapshots without needing to restore the entire datastore, making the restoration process simpler and more targeted while maintaining comprehensive data protection.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts the restoration capability from the bulk datastore restoration process down to individual VM restoration. By maintaining separate snapshots for each VM, the system allows administrators to extract and restore only the specific virtual machine that needs recovery, eliminating the complexity of selective restoration from full datastore backups.
3Productivity
If snapshots of only relevant volumes for a specific virtual machine are created, then storage usage is optimized and restoration efficiency is improved, but data consistency across multiple volumes must be maintained
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple volume snapshots into a unified consistency group snapshot for each virtual machine. By combining the snapshot operations of all volumes associated with a VM into a single atomic transaction, the system ensures that all volumes are captured at the same point in time, maintaining data consistency across distributed storage while enabling efficient individual VM restoration.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a consistency group as an intermediary layer between individual volume snapshots and virtual machine restoration. This consistency group acts as a mediator that coordinates snapshot creation across multiple volumes, ensuring they are captured consistently together, and manages the snapshot lifecycle to maintain data integrity while enabling efficient restoration operations.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods and systems for protecting virtual machines is provided. One method includes discovering, by a first plugin, from a virtual machine (“VM”) management system, a plurality of VMs that share a logical data store having a plurality of virtual volumes used for storing data for the VMs by a storage system registered with the first plugin and a virtual appliance of the VM management system; obtaining, by the first plugin, from the virtual appliance, metadata and storage layout of a set of virtual volumes used by a VM to store data; using a first application programming interface (API), by the first plugin, for identifying a first set of storage volumes used by the storage system to store data for the set of virtual volumes; and creating, by the first plugin, a consistency group (“CG”) having the identified the first set of storage volumes and generating a snapshot of the CG.