Patent ID: 7430568

Claim:
A method for creating a snapshot of a virtual volume containing stored data, comprising: identifying a virtual volume comprising a plurality of objects defining a mapping to data in at least one storage device, wherein the plurality of objects defining the mapping comprise a set of partitioning objects and a virtual volume object, wherein each one of the partitioning objects corresponds to a different portion of the data in the at least one storage device, wherein the virtual volume object comprises references to the set of partitioning objects and information identifying the type of the virtual volume, and wherein the plurality of objects defining the mapping are distributed across more than one processor in a virtualization layer between at least one host and the at least one storage device; creating a set of partition snapshots for the set of partitioning of objects, with one partition snapshot for each of the partitioning objects, wherein each of the partition snapshots comprises a point-in-time copy of the different portion of the data in the least one storage device corresponding to the one of the partitioning objects; creating a snapshot of the virtual volume object comprising a point in time copy of the virtual volume object; and generating an overall snapshot of the virtual volume from the set of partition snapshots and the snapshot of the virtual volume object.