A system for managing virtual resources in a cloud computing environment that includes a host computing device communication component and a storage system communication component. The storage system communication component identifies a storage system in a storage area network, and provisions a virtual storage resource on the identified storage system. Also included is an interface object that provisions a virtual storage resource by translating an identification of the provisioned virtual storage resource from a proprietary format into a standardized format, by accessing an interface translation file mapping each of a plurality of proprietary formats with the standardized format. Also included is a storage delivery management service that responds to a request to migrate a virtual machine from a first physical computing device to a second physical computing device by configuring a storage system to communicate with the second physical computing device according to a second communication protocol.

Methods and systems for automated management of virtual resources in a cloud computing environment

A mechanism is provided in a data processing system for performing a system upgrade. Responsive to receiving selection of one or more virtual machines to upgrade with an upgrade package, the mechanism identifies a plurality of upgrade phases. The mechanism configures the plurality of upgrade phases and generates a pre-upgrade snapshot of each of the one or more virtual machines. The mechanism performs each upgrade phase in the plurality of upgrade phases to form an upgraded virtual machine and performs one or more upgrade validation tests on the upgraded virtual machine. Responsive to the one or more upgrade validation tests succeeding, the mechanism reverts back to the pre-upgrade snapshot.

Effective Migration and Upgrade of Virtual Machines in Cloud Environments

Provided is a computing-system monitor configured to monitor a plurality of computing-systems each having a plurality of monitored computing-instances. The computing-system monitor may include a plurality of collectors, each collector executed by one of a plurality of monitored computing-instances, wherein the plurality of monitored computing-instances each are part of one of a plurality of separately monitored computing systems, and wherein each of the collectors is operable to output metrics of a corresponding monitored computing-instance executing that collector. The computing-system monitor may also include an analytics platform, the analytics platform having a plurality of analytic computing-instances, the analytics platform being operable to receive metrics output by the plurality of collectors, calculate statistics with the analytic computing-instances based on the received metrics, and output the calculated statistics.

System for monitoring elastic cloud-based computing systems as a service

A trusted virtualization platform protects sensitive customer data during operation of virtual machines in a multi-tenant cloud computing center. The trusted virtualization platform limits administrator access to the data and state of the virtual machines running thereon, reports any changes made thereto, and requires keys provided by the customer or a trusted third party of the customer to perform management operations on the virtual machines. By requiring cloud computing centers to use such trusted virtualization platforms, customers uploading their virtual machines into the cloud computing center can be assured that cloud administrators will not be able to access or tamper with their private data. Furthermore, customers can directly audit all important state or configuration changes for their virtual machines as the trusted virtualization platform can be configured to report all such changes according to a security policy set by the customer.

Securing customer virtual machines in a multi-tenant cloud

The system and method for intelligent workload management described herein may include a computing environment having a model-driven, service-oriented architecture for creating collaborative threads to manage workloads, wherein the management threads may converge information for managing identities and access credentials, enforcing policies, providing compliance assurances, managing provisioned and requested services, and managing physical and virtual infrastructure resources In one implementation, an authentication server may generate authentication tokens defining access credentials for managed entities across a plurality of authentication domains, wherein the authentication tokens may control access to resources in an information technology infrastructure For example, a management infrastructure may create service distributions for the managed entities, which may include virtual machine images hosted on physical resources Further, the authentication tokens may be embedded in the service distributions, whereby the embedded authentication tokens may control access to the resources in the information technology infrastructure

System and method for intelligent workload management

In an embodiment for deploying a new virtual appliance (225) on a data processing center (100) structure information of the new virtual appliance is determined (509-521). The structure information of the new virtual appliance includes an indication of the new virtual machines and an indication of the new software programs of each new virtual machine. Configuration information indicative of a current configuration of the data processing center is retrieved (527). License condition information indicative of license conditions applicable to the data processing center is also retrieved (530-533). A deployment scheme of the virtual appliance on the data processing center is then determined (539,548). The determination of the deployment scheme is performed by optimizing a cost function based on the license condition information, the configuration information and the structure information, and the new virtual appliance may be deployed (551) according to the deployment scheme.

Optimization of virtual appliance deployment

A software application distributed as a virtual appliance is automatically installed, updated and removed in a virtual machine system running on top of a virtual machine monitor in a computer. The software application virtual appliance comprises a virtual disk, which is automatically detected and installed or removed at the customer by a virtual disk activation manager program, which executes scripts including commands through an API to the virtual machine monitor. The virtual appliance virtual disk is also created automatically by the software manufacturing using the virtual disk activation manager program. The virtual appliance virtual disk stores the binaries of the software application, a software package created by the software manufacturer using a software package tool, an installer to execute the software package, installation and un-installation scripts and a unique identifier which is a signature for the virtual machine virtual disk.

Automatic upgrade of virtual appliances

A virtual machine belonging to a virtual computer environment is selectively cloned by retrieving information about applications available in a parent virtual machine to be cloned, and for each application, further retrieving information about a virtual disk associated with the application. Cloning is further performed by identifying a target environment on which the clone is to run, retrieving information about the target environment and calculating a clone of the virtual machine based at least in part, upon retrieved information. Calculating a clone further includes introspecting the virtual disks of the virtual machine. Cloning a virtual machine further comprises generating the clone to the target environment, based on the calculated clone.

Cloning virtual machines in a virtual computer environment

A method, system and computer program product for optimizing virtual storage in a virtual computer system including at least one virtual machine, each virtual machine being associated with one or more virtual disks. A target set of virtual machines among the virtual machines comprised in the virtual computer system is determined based on information related to the virtual machines and on shrinking constraints. For each virtual machine in the target set of virtual machines, each virtual disk associated with the virtual machine is identified. Furthermore, for each virtual disk associated with the virtual machine, the following occurs: the virtual disk is analyzed, a virtual disk saving quantity based on the virtual disk analysis is estimated, a resized virtual disk based on the estimated virtual disk saving quantity is generated, and the current virtual disk is replaced with the resized virtual disk.

Method and system for optimizing virtual storage size

A mechanism is provided to detect that a dynamic migration of a virtual environment is in progress or has been executed during a hardware or software scan without requiring instrumentation of applications running within the virtual machine. The mechanism relies on a particular sequencing and usage of application programming interfaces and commands that scanning technology provides, associated with the modularity of the scans and on the external virtual machine enabler component running on the host. The mechanism may detect a dynamic migration and take proper actions based on the system configuration. The actions may include discarding the output of the scan executed across a dynamic migration and repeat the scan. The actions may also include notifying the initialization subsystem of the non-migration-safe application to execute a script or program to address migration safety issues. One particular program or script may be an agent ID regeneration program or script.

Giuseppe Ciano

Papers

Optimization of virtual appliance deployment

Automatic upgrade of virtual appliances

Cloning virtual machines in a virtual computer environment

Method and system for optimizing virtual storage size

Detection and management of dynamic migration of virtual environments