Patent ID: 11875172
Assignee: VMWARE LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 0:
1. A method for operating a physical server in a network, the method comprising:
storing a plurality of copies of one virtual machine (VM) image at a network-accessible storage;
storing, on a f first physical computing device that executes a hypervisor, a first copy of the VM image that is used to boot-up a first VM to execute on the hypervisor of the first physical computing device; and
using a smart network interface controller (NIC) of a second physical computing device to retrieve a second copy of the same VM image from the network-accessible storage in order to boot-up a second VM on the second physical computing device, wherein to boot-up the second VM on the second physical computing device, the smart NIC converts read requests that the smart NIC receives from the second physical computing device in a first format to read requests in a second format that the smart NIC forwards to the network-accessible storage in order to retrieve data regarding the second copy of the VM image.