Patent ID: 8694712

Claim:
A method for reducing an operational cost of a virtual machine environment, comprising: using at least one virtual translation look-aside buffer (TLB) with at least one shadow page table tree (SPTT), the SPTT capable of containing entries for at least two shadow page tables (SPT), and at least one SPT residing in the SPTT, wherein the at least one SPTT maps guest virtual addresses (GVAs) to system physical addresses (SPAs); caching translations from at least one guest page table (GPT), wherein the GPT map the GVAs to guest physical addresses (GPAs); using data from the at least one of SPT or the at least one GPT to perform an operation on the virtual TLB; and taking a snapshot of at least one entry in the GPT and maintaining a list of at least one entry in the at least one SPT, wherein the snapshot is compared to at least one entry in the at least one GPT at a different time, and if a disparity exists between the snapshot and the GPT entry at the different time, updating at least one entry in the SPT that corresponds to the snapshot that exhibits the disparity with help of the list, wherein the list also contains indices to entries in the at least one SPT.