Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
DETAILED ACTION
Response to Amendment
This office action is in response to applicant’s amendment filed, 21 August 2025, of application filed, with the above serial number, on 13 July 2022 in which claims 1, 9, 17-18 have been amended. Claims 1-20 are pending in the application.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 1-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Nilakantan et al (hereinafter “Nilakantan”, 2012/0278599) in view of Quinn et al (hereinafter “Quinn”, 10,680,969), further in view of Holla et al (hereinafter “Holla”, 2020/0028792).
As per Claim 1, Nilakantan discloses a method of virtual computing instance (VCI) placement, comprising:
receiving, by a resource optimization system, physical network interface (NIC) queue availability information relating to a plurality of host computers (at least paragraph 17, 23, 26; a host with X or more physical NICs on which to boot the persona. If there are no hosts available with X or more NICs);
determining, by the resource optimization system, physical NIC queue requirements of a VCI (at least paragraph 17, 23, 26; controller 202 determines if there is a host available that may satisfy the persona's network connectivity requirements with physical NICs);
selecting, by the resource optimization system, a target host computer for the VCI from the plurality of host computers based on the physical NIC queue availability information, the physical NIC queue requirements of the VCI, and an identified network performance issue apart from processor and memory utilization of the host computers (at least paragraph 17, 23-24, 26; controller 202 determines if there is a host available that may satisfy the persona's network connectivity requirements with physical NICs. That is, the controller looks for a host with at least X number of physical NICs. If there is such a host available, the method proceeds to block 308 where the controller 202 selects a host with X or more physical NICs on which to boot the persona; In cases where the total throughput speed of a partitionable NIC is greater than the combined throughput speed of standard NICs, it may be advantageous to boot a persona on the host with the partitionable NIC rather than create vNICs); and
loading, by the resource optimization system, the VCI on the target host computer (at least paragraph 17, 23, 26; the controller 202 is configured to choose an appropriate host for a workload and automatically install or boot and configure an OS image and applications on the host).
Nilakantan fails to explicitly disclose wherein the VCI is a virtual machine (“VM”) or a container and wherein the target host computer executes a virtualization layer that abstracts processor, memory, storage, and networking resources of a hardware platform of the target host computer for use by the VCI. However, the use and advantages for using such a system was well known to one skilled in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention as evidenced by the teachings of Quinn. Quinn discloses, in an analogous art, a hypervisor/virtual machine monitor VMM/virtualized environment on a plurality of hosts determine virtual machine placement according to available host resources (at least Quinn col. 6:9-60; 3:51-66). Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to incorporate the use of Quinn’s virtual machine placement with Nilakantan. Nilakantan discloses persona, or software image, operating system placement on a determined host, and it would be obvious to have a virtual machine (and operating system/applications etc) be the persona placed with Nilakantan, and the corresponding virtual machine monitor that monitors and manages virtual machines, as such VMs and VMMs are very well known in the art, Nilakantan and Quinn each disclose computing resource placement, and placing a virtual machine would be an obvious addition to enhance Nilakantan’s persona placement.
Nilakantan and Quinn fail to explicitly disclose wherein the physical NIC queue availability information comprises one or more of: a number of available receive side scaling (RSS) engines corresponding to a given physical NIC; a number of physical NIC queues in a given RSS engine corresponding to the given physical NIC; or an association between a given physical NIC queue and a non-uniform memory access (NUMA) node. However, the use and advantages for using such a system was well known to one skilled in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention as evidenced by the teachings of Holla. Holla discloses, in an analogous art, a VM having requirements such that the VM requests and is assigned queues and an RSS engine selects the amount of PNIC queues as needed and available (at least paragraph 29, 31, 24, 3).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to incorporate the use of Holla’s RSS engines with Nilakantan and Quinn as Holla teaches this would allow throughput of data to a DCN/VM as required by the VM by load balancing PNIC queues as needed to a VM according to their requirements, allowing VM placement to utilize the full capacity of the NICs of a host rather than dedicated NICs for each VM, for VMs that do not need or fully utilize the throughput available to them.
As per Claim 2. The method of claim 1, wherein the physical NIC queue availability information further comprises one or more of: a number of active physical NICs; or a number of available physical NIC queues for transmission or reception of data (at least paragraph 17, 23-24, 26; controller 202 may preferably select either host 206 or host 208 for persona 252 as they have a sufficient number of physical NICs, however, if both of those hosts are already running a persona or are out of service, the controller may select host 210).
As per Claim 3. The method of claim 1, wherein the physical NIC queue availability information comprises information indicating an ability of one or more physical NICs to support pinning (at least paragraph 23, 26; host indicating partitionable NIC or not / instantiating vNIC or not).
As per Claim 4. The method of claim 1, wherein determining the physical NIC queue requirements of the VCI comprises determining a number of virtual NICs associated with the VCI (at least paragraph 31-33, 36, 23; persona agent instantiates a number of vNICs in the operating system of the persona that matches the number of VLANs to which the persona requires access; the controller 202 may select host 206 over host 208 as it has three physical NICs and persona 252 requires access to three VLANs; persona 252 requires access to VLANs 240 and 242 and channel 1 provides a path to both VLAN 240 and 242, the agent will bind vNIC 500 and 502 to NIC 218, which is assigned channel 1. Channel 2 provides a path to VLAN 244, so vNIC 504 is bound to NIC 220, which is assigned channel 2. After the vNICs 500, 502, and 504 have been bound to the appropriate NIC, the agent 402 configures the layer 3 networking attributes of the vNICs just as it configured the layer 3 attributes of the physical NICs in host 206. For example, the agent assigns IP address to the vNICs using information received from controller 202. Once the host 208 has been configured as described, the application software 402 may access VLAN 240 through vNIC 500, access VLAN 242 through vNIC 502, and access VLAN 244 through vNIC).
As per Claim 5. The method of claim 1, wherein determining the physical NIC queue requirements of the VCI comprises determining configuration information for one or more virtual NICs associated with the VCI (at least paragraph 23, 31; the personas contain configuration metadata including a number of attributes that describe its network connectivity, storage, and application-specific configuration. For example, an application in a persona may require network connections to specific networks (i.e. VLANs); vNICs, the application software 404 may communicate with specific VLANs in the same way it communicates through the physical NICs in host 206. But before the application software 404 does so, the agent 402 must bind the vNICs 500, 502, and 504 to physical NICs 218 and 220 based on the channel assignments of the physical NICs. Because the persona 252 requires access to VLANs 240 and 242 and channel 1 provides a path to both VLAN 240 and 242, the agent will bind vNIC 500 and 502 to NIC 218, which is assigned channel 1. Channel 2 provides a path to VLAN 244, so vNIC 504 is bound to NIC 220, which is assigned channel 2. After the vNICs 500, 502, and 504 have been bound to the appropriate NIC, the agent 402 configures the layer 3 networking attributes of the vNICs just as it configured the layer 3 attributes of the physical NICs in host 206.).
As per Claim 6. The method of claim 1, wherein determining the physical NIC queue requirements of the VCI is based on records of network traffic associated with the VCI (at least paragraph 32-33; based upon the anticipated network traffic on each of VLANs 244 and 240).
As per Claim 7. The method of claim 1, wherein determining the physical NIC queue requirements of the VCI is based on metadata associated with the VCI (at least paragraph 17, 23; personas, that include an OS image, applications installed in the OS, and configuration metadata such as network configuration attributes. In some instances, personas may be simply referred to as operating system images even though they may contain an OS image, applications, configuration metadata).
As per Claim 8. The method of claim 1, further comprising selecting, by the resource optimization system, a particular physical NIC of the target host computer for association with the VCI based on the physical NIC queue availability information and the physical NIC queue requirements of the VCI (at least paragraph 26-27; when multiple hosts having the number of physical NICs the persona/VCI requires, selecting a host based on other factors and selection criteria).
Claims 9-20 do not, in substance, add or define any additional limitations over claims 1-8 and therefore are rejected for similar reasons, supra.
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 21 August 2025 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
Applicant argues that the prior art, including Nilakantan, Quinn, and Holla do not disclose the amendment to independent claim 1 of
selecting, by the resource optimization system, a target host computer for the VCI from the plurality of host computers based on the physical NIC queue availability information, the physical NIC queue requirements of the VCI, and an identified network performance issue apart from processor and memory utilization of the host computers
Applicant recites support for the amendment in par. 51 including a host being selected based on “a level of expected network performance (e.g., low, medium, or high, a numerical value indicating a relative level of expected performance, a particular requirement with respect to a particular performance metric such as throughput and/or latency, and/or the like)”.
However, Nilakantan discloses such host selection for VM/persona placement in par. 24 “In cases where the total throughput speed of a partitionable NIC is greater than the combined throughput speed of standard NICs, it may be advantageous to boot a persona on the host with the partitionable NIC rather than create vNICs.”
The secondary reference Quinn also discloses VM host placement in col. 3:51-66:
“VM placement service may collect and store resource information for the host devices on the provider network. The resource information for a given host device may indicate amounts of host resources on the host device (e.g., ten CPUs, four GPUs, N terabytes of storage, M gigabytes of memory, etc.), may identify particular resources (e.g., CPUs 1—16, GPUs 1—4, disks 1—8, NICs 1—8, etc.) on each host device, and may indicate the current allocation status of the resources on each host device to logical slots for the host device in the control plane and assignment of the slots to particular VMs on the host device. In some embodiments, the resource information may also include resource utilization information (e.g., VM A is utilizing 70% of its CPU resources and 30% of its networking resources, VM B is utilizing 50% of its GPU resources and 100% of its networking resources, etc.)”
The secondary reference Holla also discloses load balancing PNIC queue selection and allocation based on current load of the queues (network) in par. 27, 39.
See also 892 Wahlert, Title: “Deploying Virtual Machine To Host Based On Workload Characterizations” … par. 32-33: workload characterization may be based on various factors, and as such may include… the network 16 (bandwidth available, reads and writes per unit time, etc.)…
Further, see prior cited Alexis par. 42 for NUMA availability for virtual machine placement.
Conclusion
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
The prior art made of record and not relied upon considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure is indicated in PTO form 892.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to GREGORY TODD whose telephone number is (303)297-4763. The examiner can normally be reached 8:30-5 MST.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor Nicholas Taylor can be reached on 571-272-3889. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
Information regarding the status of an application may be obtained from the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. Status information for published applications may be obtained from either Private PAIR or Public PAIR. Status information for unpublished applications is available through Private PAIR only. For more information about the PAIR system, see http://pair-direct.uspto.gov. Should you have questions on access to the Private PAIR system, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative or access to the automated information system, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000.
/GREGORY TODD/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2443