Patent ID: 7350210

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a request to read or write state data of a virtual machine, the request received from an application executed by the virtual machine; selecting a data storage mechanism to use; if the request is a data write, creating a persistence data object into which to write the data, assigning a unique identifier to the persistence data object; writing the state data into the persistence data object; storing a record of the unique identifier and the persistence data object; directing an operating system to access the data storage, and writing the data object to the data storage according to the determined data storage mechanism; and if the request is a data read, creating a persistence data object to be loaded with the data directing an operating system to access the data storage, locating state data to be read based on a unique identifier associated with a stored persistence data object; and loading the state data from the stored persistence data object into the created persistence data object according to the determined data storage mechanism.