Patent 10481984 was granted and assigned to Acronis on November, 2019 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method for minimizing VMWARE™ snapshot lifetime, by reading data from a storage snapshot created on the VM storage side. The reading is performed by mounting the storage snapshot as a new datastore on an ESX(I) host and accessing the host using a standard VMWARE™ VDDK (vStorage API) method. A pre-configured source ESX(I) host contains a VM that needs to be backed up. A SAN storage connected to the ESX(I) host over iSCSI or FibreChannel or NFS protocols is used. The backup agent, which contains the proprietary code, is installed on a physical or a virtual machine connected to an ESX(I) host. This backup agent maintains the operations with the ESX(I) host and the SAN storage and coordinates the VM virtual disks data read and write operations. The backup agent contains the executable code, which provides compatibility with SAN storage and ESX(I) host.