Tag Archives: patent

From the archives circa 2001: “logical service cloud” patent

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Sometimes, it’s fun to go back and read old things…

Abstract: A virtualized logical server cloud that enables logical servers to exist independent of physical servers that instantiate the logical servers. Servers are treated as logical resources in order to create a logical server cloud. The logical attributes of a logical server are non-deterministically allocated to physical resources creating a cloud of logical servers over the physical servers. Logical separation is facilitated by the addition of a server cloud manager, which is an automated multi-server management layer. Each logical server has persistent attributes that establish its identity. Each physical server includes or is coupled to physical resources including a network resource, a data storage resource and a processor resource. At least one physical server executes virtualization software that virtualizes physical resources for logical servers. The server cloud manager maintains status and instance information for the logical servers including persistent and non-persistent attributes that link each logical server with a physical server

Inventors: Rob Hirschfeld (me) and Dave McCrory.

Shared Nothing Virtual Cluster

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A while back (2004), Dave McCrory and Patent can protect or trap good ideasI patented an interesting curosity that we called the Shared Nothing Virtual Cluster.  Basically, the idea is to use OS RAID 1 on a VM but to have the VHDs split between physical hosts.  If the host died, the VM could be restarted on a the second host using the RAID mirror.

It was an interesting idea, but seemed less than ideal because everyone was running to SAN storage and falling madly (insanely?) in love with vMotion.

Now that we’re looking towards clouds that beyond SAN scale, the idea of mixing DAS and NAS to create instant redundancy for VMs may suddenly have more value.

Of course, Sugient owns the patent now…