A peripheral device includes one or more processors and a memory storing program instructions that when executed implement virtualization offloading components of a virtualized computing service, including a storage manager. The offloading components establish network connectivity with a control plane of the service. Based on detecting that a hardware server, in a separate enclosure, has been linked to the peripheral device, the hardware server is presented as a virtualization host of the service. The offloading components initiate compute instance configuration operations at the server in response to commands issued to the control plane, including at least one configuration operation initiated by the storage manager to enable access to a logical storage device from a compute instance.

A method and system for leveraging file-based backups to facilitate bare-metal recovery (BMR) and/or system-state recovery (SSR) operations. In leading to a BMR operation (which may include, but is not limited to, data protected under a SSR operation), logical groupings of data, each including multiple files and/or directories that span across one or more file-systems, may be written to backup media to comply with data backup, archiving, and/or disaster recovery strategies. Backing up said logical groupings of data relies on block-based backup technologies, which upon requiring a subset of a given logical grouping of data to be restored, makes the restoration process impossible to fulfill since determining which blocks of data belong to which files and/or directories are not tracked. Accordingly, the disclosed method and system propose an intelligent scheme through which file-based backup technology may be employed to enable BMR and/or SSR from any single BMR-compliant backup copy.

An example method of handling, at a hypervisor on a host in a virtualized computing system, a write input/output (IO) operation to a file on a storage device having a virtual machine file system (VMFS) is described. The method includes: sorting, at the hypervisor, a scatter-gather array for the write IO operation into sets of scatter-gather elements, each of the sets including at least one scatter-gather element targeting a common file block address; resolving offsets of the sets of scatter-gather elements to identify a first scatter-gather array of transaction-dependent scatter-gather elements; generating logical transactions for the first scatter-gather array having updates to metadata of the VMFS for the file; batching the logical transactions into a physical transaction; and executing the physical transaction to commit the updates to the metadata of the VMFS on the storage device for the file.

A virtualization system in which a plurality of virtual machines operate on a single physical machine having a plurality of cores is provided. The virtualization system comprises: a plurality of hardware; a hardware control core that controls operation of the plurality of hardware; a plurality of virtual machine cores each operating a guest OS; and a shared memory that is a memory configured to be accessed by the hardware control core and the plurality of virtual machine cores concurrently and in parallel.

An embodiment of an electronic apparatus may include one or more substrates, and logic coupled to the one or more substrates, the logic to provide an interface to a pooled memory that is configured as a combination of local memory and remote memory, wherein the remote memory is shared between multiple compute nodes, allocate respective memory portions of the pooled memory to respective tenants, associate respective memory balloons with the respective tenants that correspond to the allocated respective memory portions, and manage the respective memory balloons based on the respective tenants and two or more memory tiers associated with the pooled memory. Other embodiments are disclosed and claimed.

A host computing system may include a processor and a memory coupled to the processor. The memory may include an auto-discovery module to broadcast a message to a set of management nodes in a data center. The message may include a configuration policy. Further, the auto-discovery module may receive an acknowledgment message from a management node. The acknowledgment message may indicate that the management node supports the configuration policy. Furthermore, the auto-discovery module may establish a trust relationship with the management node in response to receiving the acknowledgment message. Further, the auto-discovery module may enable the host computing system to add to a cluster managed by the management node upon establishing the trust relationship.

An example method of handling, at a hypervisor on a host in a virtualized computing system, a write input/output (IO) operation to a file on a storage device having a virtual machine file system (VMFS) is described. The method includes: sorting, at the hypervisor, a scatter-gather array for the write IO operation into sets of scatter-gather elements, each of the sets including at least one scatter-gather element targeting a common file block address; resolving offsets of the sets of scatter-gather elements to identify a first scatter-gather array of transaction-dependent scatter-gather elements; generating logical transactions for the first scatter-gather array having updates to metadata of the VMFS for the file; batching the logical transactions into a physical transaction; and executing the physical transaction to commit the updates to the metadata of the VMFS on the storage device for the file.

Systems and methods described herein are directed to upgrading one or more of add-on firmware and disk firmware for a server, which can involve connecting a port of the server to an isolated network, the isolated network dedicated to firmware upgrades for the server; caching onto cache memory of the server, an operating system received through the isolated network; booting the operating system on the server from the cache memory; conducting an Network File System (NFS) mount on the server to determine hardware information associated with the upgrading of the one or more of the add-on firmware and the disk firmware; and upgrading the one or more of the add-on firmware and the disk firmware based on the hardware information.

In accordance with an embodiment, described herein is a system and method use of a controller with a software application container orchestration system, which is adapted to provide safe and efficient replacement of nodes in a containerized environment. A node replacement controller drives the process of node replacement, and indirectly and asynchronously interacts, through metadata, with an implementation-specific node processor, and application-specific health controller, to discover nodes that should be processed, determine when the application workload is in a stable state, declare those nodes as ready to be processed, and determine when those nodes have finished processing. The node replacement controller can be implemented once for a given type of container orchestration system, and then applied to other container orchestration implementations (vendors) and workload types using that container orchestration system.

Systems, methods, and computer-readable media for operating a dedicated virtual machine host cluster within cloud computing infrastructure are described herein. In one embodiment, an instance principal certificate that includes a virtual network identifier for a dedicated virtual network for the cluster is retrieved by a host computing device. The instance principal certificate is authenticated by the host against a switch to grant access of the host to a virtual network indicated by the virtual network identifier through a network interface card of the host. A virtual function of the network interface card of the host is allocated to a guest virtual machine. The guest virtual machine is launched in the host with the virtual function as a network device of the guest virtual machine.