US Patent 9998339 Application awareness for virtual infrastructure environments

An application awareness system for a virtualized infrastructure. The application awareness system may use commands in standardized protocols to obtain data from virtual entities in the virtualized infrastructure. The data may be processed to indicate applications on specific virtual entities. The application awareness system may interact with those applications to gain information about the configuration of the application, or for a distributed application, components of the application on each of the plurality of virtual entities. These techniques may be applied to both virtual machines and containers, generating data that may be used in any of multiple management functions performed on the virtual infrastructure, such as backup, monitoring and resource allocation.