Patent ID: 8650165

Claim:
A system for managing data policies for a plurality of virtual machines, the system comprising: a policy manager engine configured for: receiving graph data for each virtual machine, each virtual machine being allocated at least one virtual storage component, each virtual storage component having a corresponding storage object hosted on a storage system for storing data of the virtual machine, the graph data describing a mapping graph for the virtual machine, the mapping graph representing mappings between the virtual machine and each of its storage objects, each mapping between the virtual machine and a storage object being determined by determining high-level storage object information used by the virtual machine to access a virtual storage component corresponding to the storage object, the high-level storage object information mapping the virtual machine to the virtual storage component, determining low-level storage object information used by a storage system to access the storage object which corresponds to the virtual storage component, the low-level storage object information mapping the virtual storage component to the storage object, and combining the high-level and low-level storage object information to determine the mapping between the virtual machine and the storage object, the mapping graph comprising: a virtual machine node representing the virtual machine; at least one virtual storage node, each virtual storage node representing a virtual storage component and comprising a child node of the virtual machine node; and at least one storage object node, each storage object node representing a storage object and comprising a child node of a virtual storage node; grouping the plurality of virtual machines into a plurality of datasets, each dataset comprising at least two virtual machines; and performing at least one policy on each dataset by performing the at least one policy on each virtual machine in the dataset by using the graph data of each virtual machine.