Patent ID: 9471590
Filing Date: 2016-10-18
CPC Classification: G06F

Claim Text:
1. A method, comprising: identifying data representing a first instance of a virtual machine image on a first storage device to be replicated to a second storage device; copying a deduplication metadata file that describes the first instance of the virtual machine image from the first storage device to the second storage device, wherein the deduplication metadata file comprises a list of one or more virtual machine image data files for the first instance of the virtual machine image and associated reference links to data blocks of the one or more virtual machine image data files; determining, based on metadata describing the data blocks of the one or more virtual machine image data files in the deduplication metadata file, which data representing the first instance of the virtual machine image matches data from a set of data on the second storage device; forming a second instance of the virtual machine image on the second storage device based on the metadata description in the deduplication metadata file to replicate the first instance of the virtual machine image at the second storage device, wherein forming the second instance of the virtual machine image on the second storage device further comprises: