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

Claim 18:
19. A system comprising:
a network-accessible storage storing a plurality of copies of one virtual machine (VM) image;
a first physical computing device executing a hypervisor on which a f first VM runs by storing, on the first physical computing device, a first copy of the VM image that is used to boot-up the first VM; and
a second physical computing device comprising a smart network interface controller (NIC) used to retrieve a second copy of the same VM image from the network-accessible storage, wherein the second physical computing device boots-up a second VM by using the second copy of the same VM image, 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.