Patent ID: 11947990
Assignee: COMMVAULT SYSTEMS, INC.
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 8:
9. A system comprising:
a backup proxy virtual machine, which executes on a computer host that comprises one or more hardware processors and that operates in a cloud computing environment, and wherein the backup proxy virtual machine comprises a data storage, and wherein the backup proxy virtual machine is communicatively coupled to a host virtual machine, which executes on a computer host that comprises one or more hardware processors and that operates in the cloud computing environment, and wherein the host virtual machine comprises a first hypervisor, which hosts a first nested virtual machine that is nested within the host virtual machine, and wherein the backup proxy virtual machine is in communication with a secondary storage that comprises a block-level backup copy of a second virtual machine on a second hypervisor, wherein metadata from the second hypervisor was not included in the block-level backup copy of the second virtual machine;
wherein the backup proxy virtual machine is further configured to:
instruct the first hypervisor to use the data storage at the backup proxy virtual machine as a virtual disk for the first nested virtual machine;
create an association between the virtual disk and the block-level backup copy;
cause the first nested virtual machine to be powered up and to communicatively couple to the data storage at the backup proxy virtual machine as the virtual disk for the first nested virtual machine;
intercept a first read request issued by the first nested virtual machine and addressed to the virtual disk;
based on determining that a first data block requested in the first read request is not in the data storage, retrieve the first data block from the block-level backup copy, and store the first data block into the data storage, and serve the first data block from the data storage to the first nested virtual machine in response to the first read request;
based on determining that a second data block requested in a second read request issued by the first nested virtual machine is present in the data storage, serve the second data block from the data storage to the first nested virtual machine in response to the second read request; and
reclaim storage space in the data storage by discarding the first data block therefrom based on determining that the first data block was previously retrieved from the block-level backup copy.