Virtual Machine Archival APIs
Introduction of Virtual Machines (VMs) has wiped out the mandatory cap on the rate at which the server trail grew. However this led to the problem of VM sprawl , which essentially means persistent deployment and growth of virtual machines, some of which sit unused long after their useful lives. VM sprawl can cause unwanted consumption of: CPU cycles and memory resources Disk space, backup process time and bandwidth Expensive primary storage capacity such as Fibre Channel-attached storage-area network (SAN) disks The problem of VM sprawl can be addressed by intelligent VM archiving . The process of VM archival starts with creation of what are essentially big files that represent disk images. The disk images are then archived and can be managed similarly to traditional archive data sets. The standardization of APIs for virtual machine archival enables integration of archival solutions into virtual environments. A typical VM archival API architecture comprises of: ...