Patent ID: 9747124
Date: 2017-08-29
CPC Classifications: G06F,H04L

Claim:
1. A method of distributed virtual machine (VM) image management in a cloud computing environment, the method comprising: receiving in a hypervisor executing in a memory of a host computer, a request for VM image data for a portion of a VM image; determining whether the requested VM image data is present in a copy on write (COW) data store of the hypervisor of the host computer; upon determining that the requested VM image data is present in the COW data store of the hypervisor of the host computer, retrieving the requested VM image data from the COW data store of the hypervisor of the host computer; upon determining that the requested VM image data is not present in the COW data store of the hypervisor of the host computer, determining whether the requested VM image data is present in either a local cache of the hypervisor of the host computer or in a cache of a hypervisor of a peer host; and, retrieving the requested VM image data from a VM image seed in a remote data store in the cloud computing environment only upon determining that the VM image data neither is present in the local cache of the hypervisor of the host computer nor is present in the cache of the hypervisor of the peer host.