Patent ID: 8583852

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving an Input/Output (I/O) write from a first virtual machine of a plurality of virtual machines, wherein the plurality of virtual machines are executed on at least one server, each of the plurality of virtual machines is configured to generate one or more I/O writes to a VMFS file system on a primary storage, the I/O write comprises data and an offset at which the data is to be stored in the VMFS file system on the primary storage, and the at least one server and the primary storage are coupled to a network; determining a virtual machine (VM) indicator using the offset; generating a secondary write to a secondary storage based on the I/O write, wherein the secondary storage is coupled to the network, and the secondary write comprises the data and the VM indicator associated with the I/O write; and accessing the secondary storage to write the secondary write, wherein the secondary storage is operable to store the data using the VM indicator.