METHOD OF COPYING A DATA IMAGE FROM A SOURCE TO A TARGET STORAGE DEVICE IN A FAULT TOLERANT COMPUTER SYSTEM

摘要

A fault tolerant computer system is connected over a network with one or more I/O devices. The fault-tolerant computer system has two host devices each of which support a virtual machine (VM) that operates on the same set of instructions (FT application) at substantially the same time, and each VM is allocated space on different virtual containers. In the event that the operational state of one VM is downgraded, due to the unexpected failure of a virtual container associated with it, a mirroring operation is initiated that does not copy empty blocks of information from a source virtual container to a virtual container associated with the downgraded VM if corresponding blocks on the source and the target virtual containers have do not contain any information.

主权项

1. A method of performing a disk mirroring operation between a source virtual storage container and a target virtual storage container in a fault tolerant computer system, comprising:
reading, by a first virtual machine comprising the fault tolerant computer system, a first block of information in the source virtual container and determining that the first block of information is only filled with a plurality of zeros; reading, by a second virtual machine comprising the fault tolerant computer system, a block of information in the target virtual container that corresponds to the first block of information read by the first virtual machine in the source virtual container, and the second virtual machine determining that the block of information it reads is only filled with a plurality of zeros; and controlling the fault tolerant computer system to not copy the first block of information read from the source virtual container to the target virtual container.