Patent ID: 8776089

Claim:
A method for obtaining data for a virtual machine in a server supporting a hypervisor for running virtual machines, the method comprising: receiving a read request from the virtual machine intended for transmission to a virtual drive that is accessed through a root virtual machine running in the server; confirming that the read request corresponds to a specific content type in the virtual drive; identifying an entry in a cache index, wherein the entry includes (i) information that matches (a) an address offset in the read request and (b) an identity associated with the virtual machine, and (ii) a reference to data stored in a cache maintained in a local memory in the server; circumventing a standard I/O stack of the root virtual machine used to access the virtual drive by requesting the data directly from the local memory by providing address information corresponding to the reference to a driver for the local memory; receiving the data from the driver for the local memory; and transmitting the data to the virtual machine in response to the read request.