Patent ID: 8056076

Claim:
A method for acquiring a quiesceing set of information associated with a virtual machine, said method comprising: cloning a virtual machine without interrupting the operation of said virtual machine, wherein a persistent storage device is associated with said cloned virtual machine; and transforming the state of said persistent storage device into a quiesced state of said cloned virtual machine; executing a shut-down process on said cloned virtual machine, wherein said shut-down process quiesces said cloned virtual machine; and automatically storing the quiesceing set of information of said cloned virtual machine on said persistent storage device; performing an operation on the quiesceing set of information of said cloned virtual machine stored on said persistent storage device; the method further comprising: renaming a main memory of said virtual machine to a memory-image file of a snapshot of said virtual machine; creating a first file to represent a first guest memory in said virtual machine as said virtual machine continues to execute; populating said first file with demand paging and prefetching from said memory-image file; creating a second file to represent a second guest memory for said cloned virtual machine; and populating said second file with demand paging and prefetching from said memory-image file.