Suspend-resume of virtual machines using de-duplication

摘要

A technique for data de-duplication is applied to suspend and resume operations for virtual machines (VMs) to reduce the time needed to suspend or resume a virtual machine and store the suspended VMs in a space-efficient and time-efficient manner. A VM's state is serialized and written to disk in the form of key values that are used to retrieve data from a key-data map. The key-data map stores unique data blocks for suspended VM images. The key-data map can be stored in a solid-state drive to further reduce latency and access time.

主权项

1. A method for suspending a virtual machine executing in a physical host, the method comprising:
suspending execution of a virtual machine having data stored in a virtual memory space allocated for the virtual machine; dividing the data in the virtual memory space into a plurality of blocks; determining a plurality of keys corresponding to data in the plurality of blocks; storing the plurality of keys in a key-data map that associates each of the plurality of keys with corresponding data from the plurality of blocks; and generating, on a storage device, a saved state file comprising the plurality of keys, wherein the saved state file represents a state of the virtual memory space of the suspended virtual machine.