Reducing redundant validations for live operating system migration

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-10169099-B2
Application number	US-201514860765-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Sep 22, 2015
Priority date	Jul 24, 2015
Publication date	Jan 1, 2019
Grant date	Jan 1, 2019

Abstract

A method, system, and program product is provided for reducing redundant validations for live operating system migration. A control point caches at least one validation inventory that is associated with a logical partition (LPAR). The control point sends the cached validation inventory to a virtualization manager upon an activation of the LPAR associated with the validation inventory. The control point invalidates the cached validation inventory upon notification from the virtualization manager that the validation inventory is changed and is no longer valid. The control point re-validates the validation inventory.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A method to reduce redundant validations for live operating system migration to increase performance of a previous mobility event, the method comprising:
monitoring, by a virtualization manager, for configuration changes in a validation inventory, wherein the validation inventory comprises data selected from a group consisting of: physical hardware data related to a previous mobility event, and virtual hardware data related to the previous mobility event, and wherein the live operating system migration is performed by a control point and the virtualization manager in combination, and wherein monitoring for the configuration changes in the validation inventory based on determining configuration changes in one or more of a Virtual Fiber Channel (VFC), a Storage Area Network (SAN), and an external storage subsystem;
receiving a request to perform the live operating system migration of a logical partition (LPAR) from a source LPAR on a source computer to a target LPAR on a target computer, wherein the target LPAR is created using the validation inventory corresponding to the source LPAR,
receiving from a repository of validation inventory and based on the received request the validation inventory corresponding to the source LPAR;
in response to determining that the monitored validation inventory has changed, re-validating the received validation inventory prior to beginning the live operating system migration of the source LPAR to the target LPAR and re-caching the repository of validation inventory with the re-validated validation inventory, perform the live operating system migration of the source LPAR to the target LPAR;
and
in response to determining that the monitored validation inventory has not changed, perform the live operating system migration of the source LPAR to the target LPAR by using contents of the unchanged validation inventory, allowing the source LPAR to continually run during the live operating system migration, and without performing the re-validation of the received validation inventory.

2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
receiving, at the control point, from the virtualization manager a validation list, wherein the validation list includes one or more physical or virtual hardware resources that have changed in the validation inventory since the previous mobility event;
re-validating the validation inventory prior to beginning the migrating;
updating the repository of validation inventory with the re-validated validation inventory; and
sending to the virtualization manager the re-validated validation inventory.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the source LPAR hints directly to the control point to re-validate the validation inventory corresponding to the source LPAR in response to a high availability fail-over event.

4. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
receiving, by the virtualization manager, one or more changes in the validation inventory corresponding to the source LPAR, wherein the control point sends the one or more changes;
applying the received changes to the validation inventory corresponding to the source LPAR; and
notifying the control point to invalidate a cached copy of the validation inventory corresponding to the source LPAR.

5. The method of claim 1 , wherein the validation inventory includes:
an indication of validity of the validation inventory;
a unique LPAR identifier;
physical and virtual I/O device configuration;
the source and target physical computer systems;
an indication of priority for receiving excess system resources;
an operating system environment;
an amount of memory;
processor capacity;
a World Wide port number (WWPN) pair associated with a virtual fiber channel (VFC) adapter;
an identifier associated with a fabric to which the VFC adapter is attached; and
logical unit (LUN) identifiers associated with the WWPN pair to which the VFC adapter is attached.

6. The method of claim 2 , wherein re-validating the validation inventory further comprises:
partially validating, by the control point, the validation inventory, wherein only a changed resource is validated; and
fully validating, by the control point, each resource in the validation inventory.

Assignees

• IBM

Inventors

• Atluri Uma S
• Hart Brian W
• Kalavakolanu Anil
• Pham Minh Q
• Pham Teresa H
• Yeung Evelyn T

Classifications

• G06F9/45558 Primary

  Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects · CPC title

• G06F2009/45583

  Memory management, e.g. access or allocation · CPC title

• G06F9/5088

  involving task migration · CPC title

• G06F2009/4557

  Distribution of virtual machine instances; Migration and load balancing · CPC title

• G06F9/5077 Primary

  Logical partitioning of resources; Management or configuration of virtualized resources (specific details on emulation or internal functioning of virtual machines G06F9/455) · CPC title