Patent ID: 8386610

Claim:
A method for analyzing and correcting a storage load imbalance in a storage network environment with virtual clusters, each having one or more virtual machines, the method comprising: collecting information from components in the storage network environment, the information including state and connectivity information of the virtual machines; deriving one or more access paths in the storage network environment and analyzing input/output (I/O) traffic along the one or more access paths, wherein each of the one or more access paths comprises an end-to-end relationship between at least one virtual machine and an associated storage device in the storage network environment; generating an I/O ranking for each of the virtual machines based on I/O traffic between the virtual machines and storage devices associated with the virtual machines; collecting performance information of the associated storage devices including I/O requests from each of the storage devices unavailable at an array cache; computing storage utilization for each of the storage devices as a function of the collected performance information; generating a storage utilization ranking for each of the storage devices based on the computed storage utilization; identifying a first virtual machine on a first virtual cluster with a high I/O ranking associated with a first data object that is associated with a first storage device having a first storage utilization ranking; identifying a second virtual cluster associated with a second data object that is associated with a second storage device having a second storage utilization ranking, wherein the second storage utilization ranking is lower than the first storage utilization ranking; and moving the first virtual machine from the first virtual cluster to the second virtual cluster so that the first virtual machine is associated with the second data object instead of the first data object, thereby correcting the storage load balance.