Patent ID: 11900139
Assignee: VMWARE LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  H | IPC G

Claim 1:
2. A computer system comprising:
physical hardware resources of a data center;
a virtualization management server configured with a virtualization management software to provision virtual compute, storage and network resources from the physical hardware resources; and
a cloud computing management software configured to partition the compute, storage and network resources to different tenants of the data center, wherein
the virtualization management server is programmed to execute a workflow in a virtual machine, which is one of the virtual compute resources and has been deployed to implement a virtual network function of a network service, by performing the steps of:
in response to receiving at the data center a request to execute instructions of a workflow in a virtual machine, wherein a virtual network function identifier, a workflow execution method, and a pointer to the instructions of the workflow are received with the request as parameters of the request:
identifying using the virtual network function identifier, a virtual machine deployed in the data center to implement one of the virtual network functions corresponding to the virtual network function identifier, in which the instructions of the workflow are to be executed; and
issuing a command to the virtual machine to execute the instructions of the workflow, according to the workflow execution method,
wherein the virtual machine, in response to the issued command, executes the instructions of the workflow that have been retrieved using the pointer, and
wherein the workflow execution method is an SSH (secure shell) script method that includes the steps of:
retrieving the instructions of the workflow using the pointer to the instructions of the workflow;
injecting the instructions of the workflow into the virtual machine; and
instructing the virtual machine to execute the instructions.