Li Zheng

US Patent:

20180060104, Mar 1, 2018

Filed:

Aug 1, 2017

Appl. No.:

15/665742

Inventors:

- Palo Alto CA, US
Derek Beard - Austin TX, US
Li Zheng - Palo Alto CA, US
Brian Forney - Mountain View CA, US
Brian Rak - Austin TX, US
Ali Reza Alibhai - Cupertino CA, US

International Classification:

G06F 9/455
G06F 9/48
G06F 9/50

Abstract:

Instructions to fork a source VM are received, and execution of the source VM is temporarily stunned. A destination VM is created, and a snapshot of a first virtual disk of the source VM is created. A checkpoint state of the source VM is transferred to the destination VM. The source VM has one or more virtual disks. One or more virtual disks associated with the destination VM are created and reference the one or more virtual disks of the source VM. Execution of the destination VM is restored using the transferred checkpoint state and the virtual disks of the destination VM in a way that allows the source VM to also resume execution. Forking VMs using the described operation provisions destination VMs in a manner that makes efficient use of memory and disk space, while enabling source VMs to continue execution after completion of the fork operation.