MANAGEMENT OF VIRTUAL MACHINE SNAPSHOTS

摘要

Methods and systems for managing, storing, and serving data within a virtualized environment are described. In some embodiments, a data management system may manage the extraction and storage of virtual machine snapshots, provide near instantaneous restoration of a virtual machine or one or more files located on the virtual machine, and enable secondary workloads to directly use the data management system as a primary storage target to read or modify past versions of data. The data management system may allow a virtual machine snapshot of a virtual machine stored within the system to be directly mounted to enable substantially instantaneous virtual machine recovery of the virtual machine.

主权项

1. A method for operating a data management system, comprising:
acquiring a set of files corresponding with a plurality of versions of a virtual machine; determining a first version of the plurality of versions associated with a base file of the set of files; determining a second version of the plurality of versions associated with a new base file to be generated, the first version of the virtual machine corresponds with a first state of the virtual machine at a first point in time, the second version of the virtual machine corresponds with a second state of the virtual machine at a second point in time subsequent to the first point in time; generating the new base file corresponding with the second version, the generating the new base file includes patching the base file with one or more forward incremental files of the set of files, the one or more forward incremental files correspond with the second version and one or more versions of the virtual machine between the first version and the second version; generating a set of reverse incremental files corresponding with the first version and the one or more versions of the virtual machine between the first version and the second version; storing the new base file using a first storage device; and storing the set of reverse incremental files using a second storage device different from the first storage device.