Patent ID: 8335902

Claim:
A method for performing a storage operation in a virtual computing environment, the method comprising: under control of a storage operations computing system comprising a physical computing device, the storage operations computing system in communication with a physical host computing system configured to execute one or more virtual machines having a guest operating system, each virtual machine associated with a virtual machine disk file stored on a physical datastore, quiescing write requests and permitting read requests of a virtual machine disk file by one or more applications executing on the virtual machine associated with the virtual machine disk file; determining whether the write requests of the one or more applications were successfully quiesced; in response to determining that the write requests were successfully quiesced, creating a snapshot of the virtual machine file; following creating the snapshot, allowing write requests to resume by the one or more applications executing on the virtual machine; recording, using the snapshot, changes intended to be made to the virtual machine disk file based on the resumed write requests; unlocking the virtual machine disk file for read-only access by a backup process executing outside the guest operating system of the virtual machine; copying, via the backup process executing outside the guest operating system, the virtual machine disk file to a backup file on a destination storage device, the copying performed without powering down the virtual machine; following copying the virtual machine disk file to the destination storage device, committing the changes recorded using the snapshot to the virtual machine disk file; and locking the virtual machine disk file for normal access by the virtual machine.