ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,436,788, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to VMware LLC (Palo Alto, Calif.).
"Efficient mass virtual machine (VM) cloning" was invented by Alexander Krits (Austin, Texas), Pavan Narasimhaprasad (Cedar Park, Texas), Li Zheng (Palo Alto, Calif.), Ali Reza Alibhai (Richmond Hill, Canada), Arunachalam Ramanathan (Union City, Calif.), Sampath Kumar Kilaparthi (San Jose, Calif.) and Nathan Lyle Prziborowski (Eugene, Ore.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In one set of embodiments, during an initial pre-copying phase, copies of the virtual disks of a VM or VM template can be distributed across one or more datastores, prior to the start of any cloning...