Patent ID: 8843922

Claim:
A virtual-machine generating apparatus comprising: a processor; a configuration-information storage unit that stores, for each of a plurality of virtual machines, resource information indicative of hardware resources of each virtual machine, including a number of CPUs, a memory amount and a disk capacity in association with a unique information of each virtual machine, the configuration-information storage unit further stores information including an install flag and a name of a copy-source machine in association with the unique information of each virtual machine; a configuration-information checking unit executing on the processor that, when generating a first virtual machine in the plurality of virtual machines, accepts unique information and resource information of the first virtual machine, and determines whether a resource information identical to the resource information of the first virtual machine is stored in the configuration-information storage unit; and a virtual machine generating unit executing on the processor that, when it is determined that the resource information identical to the resource information of the first virtual machine is stored in the configuration-information storage unit, (i) sets the install flag corresponding to the first virtual machine to a first value, (ii) acquires and temporarily stores, as the name of the copy-source virtual machine corresponding to the first virtual machine, the unique information of a second virtual machine whose resource information is determined to be identical to the resource information of the first virtual machine, (iii) installs an operating system of the first virtual machine by copying an operating system from a disk of the second virtual machine, and (iv) after installing the operating system of the first virtual machine, deletes the name of the copy-source virtual machine associated with the first virtual machine from the configuration-information storage unit.