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
This Office Action is taken in response to Applicant’s Amendment and Remarks filed on April 7, 2026 regarding Application No. 18/468153 originally filed on September 15, 2023.
Claims 1, 13, 18 and 20 were amended.
Claims 1-20 are pending for consideration.
Response to Remarks and Amendments
Applicants’ amendments and remarks have been fully and carefully considered, with the Examiner’s response set forth below.
Applicant argues that “Tang does not disclose "the first configurable set of rules are defined by an administrative user through an administrative application, wherein each rule includes a triggering event component, a conditional expression component, and an action component." Tang states, "the rules are implemented by complex event processing techniques.” (Remarks p.8). The examiner respectfully disagrees.
Applicant’s arguments are not commensurate with the current rejection because the rejection does not rely on Tang alone for the entire disputed limitation. Rather, Sulcer is relied upon for the administrative-user and administrative-application aspects of the limitation, while Tang is relied upon for the rule structure and event/condition/action rule processing. Accordingly, Applicant’s argument that Tang lacks an administrative application does not overcome the rejection based on the combined teachings. Moreover, the claim does not exclude rules that operate within a larger diagnostic, scoring, or planning framework; the limitation merely requires that each rule include a triggering event component, a conditional expression component, and an action component. Tang’s disclosed rules satisfy that structure even though Tang also describes hypotheses, scoring, and remediation-plan selection as additional processing. Applicant’s argument that Tang uses scoring, hypotheses, and remediation plans is therefore not persuasive because the presence of additional hypothesis-generation or scoring functionality does not teach away from, or negate, Tang’s disclosure of event-triggered conditional rules with corresponding actions. Tang expressly discloses rules in an “if event … then action” format, and the further use of scoring to select among remediation plans merely describes additional processing that does not remove the disclosed trigger, condition, and action aspects from Tang’s rules.
Applicant’s other arguments with respect to the independent claims have been considered but are moot because the new ground of rejection does not rely on any reference applied in the prior rejection of record for any teaching or matter specifically challenged in the argument.
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 Sulcer (US 2021/0026679) in view of Tang (WO 2014015697); and further in view of Schmitt (US 2022/0174096).
Regarding claim 1, Sulcer teaches a virtual desktop system (“FIG. 1 shows a high level block diagram of a cloud based desktop service system 10, providing virtual persistent desktops for users in multiple regions.” [0064], and “FIG. 2 shows a high level block diagram of another example cloud based desktop service system 200.” [0076]) comprising: one or more virtual desktops (“The primary regional data center 112 includes an example desktop pool 130 that includes a series of primary desktops 132, 134, 136, and 138.” [0056], “The secondary data center 114 may create a secondary desktop pool 140 that includes secondary desktops 142, 144, 146, and 148.” [0056], and “A desktop is a virtual desktop, or, a regional data center server creating a virtual desktop or virtual application experience.” [0039]) and associated public or private cloud infrastructure (“The datacenters such as the datacenters 112 and 114 typically comprises IT infrastructure that is physically managed by a cloud-provider’s IT personnel.” [0055], “The IT infrastructure may include servers, network infrastructure, load balancers, gateways, operating systems, software, and so on.” [0055], and “In this example, the same public cloud provider may provide both the primary desktop pool 130 and the secondary desktop pool 140. Alternatively, a different public cloud provider may provide the secondary desktop pool 140.” [0056]); and a control plane configured to manage a life cycle of the one or more virtual desktops on the cloud infrastructure (“The control plane 110 can manage the entire lifecycle of the implementation of a regional datacenter, from creating and managing the required desktops, to monitoring and analyzing the stream of operational data collected, enforcing security policies, and optimizing the experience for IT administrators and desktop users.” [0059], and “The present disclosure relates to a regional disaster recovery system for a virtual desktop system. The system includes regional data centers that are managed by a control plane.” [0032]); a first configurable set of rules are defined by an administrative user through an administrative application (“An administration tool 350 is operated by an administrative user 352.” [0095], “As will be explained, the administration tool 350 allows the administrative user 352 to configure the control plane 110.” [0095], and “The administration tool 350 works directly with the control plane 110 as its primary human interface. The administration tool 350 allows the administrative user 352 to configure the functions of the control plane 110 through the configuration service 318.” [0098]), and (v) provide diagnostics related to the one or more executed rules to the control plane for further analysis (“The control plane 110 can manage the entire lifecycle of the implementation of a regional datacenter, from creating and managing the required desktops, to monitoring and analyzing the stream of operational data collected…” [0059], “The monitoring service 312 makes both routine events and error events available to administrators and can analyze operational performance and reliability.” [0096], and “The monitoring service 312 receives operational data from different agents monitoring the resources of the cloud desktop service system 100.” [0096]), and results and status of a virtual machine after the actions have been taken (“The desktop management service 314 interacts with one or more managed virtual machines (MVMs) 332 in the regional cloud datacenter 112.” [0096], “The data center 112 also includes an agent software 334 installed on a managed virtual machine 332 that can perform desktop operations on, and collect data from, the managed virtual machine 332 at the direction of the control plane 110.” [0096], and “Operations are performed on a managed virtual machine 332 using a Cloud provider operational API (CPOAPI) 336 provided as part of the infrastructure as a service. For example, the operational API may be used for powering on or powering off a managed virtual machine.” [0097]).
Sulcer, however, does not explicitly teach the cloud infrastructure being configured to:
(i) receive a first configurable set of rules from the control plane, and wherein each rule includes a triggering event component, a conditional expression component, and an action component,
(ii) store the first configurable set of rules,
(iii) evaluate the first configurable set of rules to determine whether conditions associated with one or more rules are met,
(iv) based on the conditions being met, perform one or more actions to execute the one or more rules, and
(v) the diagnostics including conditions that caused a rule evaluation, actions taken.
Schmitt, in analogous art, teaches a cloud infrastructure being configured to (“The controller 200 may be configured to apply global system rules 210 to an IT system 100 on physical resources. The controller 200 may be configured to apply global system rules 210 to an IT system 100 on virtual resources. The controller 200 may be configured to apply global system rules 210 to an IT system 100 on a combination of physical and virtual resources.” [0119], and “The example set of system rules 210 shown by FIG. 2M may be loaded into the controller 200 or derived by querying the system state…” [0120]):
(i) receive a first configurable set of rules from the control plane (“The main controller 1401 may load the global rules 210 (or a subset thereof) onto the sub-systems 1400a, 1400b as rules 1410a, 1410b respectively in a manner that the global rules 210 (or subset thereof) dictate the operation of the controllers 1401a, 140lb and their sub-systems 1400a, 1400b.” [0297], and “Each new controller (which can be referred to as a ‘sub-controller’) may receive new configuration rules that may be a subset of the configuration rules of the main controller.” [0293]);
(ii) store the first configurable set of rules (“The system 100 comprises global system rules 210. The global system rules 210, among other things may declare the rules that set up, configure, boot, allocate and manage the resources that may include compute, storage and networking.” [0119], “The system rules 210 can also contain a resource list 210.18 which may dictate which components get allocated to which resources and will allow the controller logic 205 to determine if the proper resources and/or hardware are available.” [0124], and “Any configuration that occurs is a recorded in a database.” [0091]);
(iii) evaluate the first configurable set of rules to determine whether conditions associated with one or more rules are met (“The controller logic 205 may read the global system rules develop a list of tasks to get to the correct state and issue instructions to fulfill the rules based on available operations.” [0152], “After each instruction, controller logic 205 may check the system state database versus expected state of the global rules to verify if the expected operation completed correctly.” [0153], and “At step 210.20, the controller logic 205 checks to make sure the appropriate resources are available…” [0126]),
(iv) based on the conditions being met, perform one or more actions to execute the one or more rules (“The controller logic 205 may read the global system rules develop a list of tasks to get to the correct state and issue instructions to fulfill the rules based on available operations.” [0152], “The controller logic 205 may contain logic for executing operations, e.g. start up system, add, remove, reconfigure resources; identify what is available to do.” [0152], and “The controller logic may allocate the resources, update the state and go to the next set of tasks to implement the global rules.” [0153]), and
(v) … actions taken (“After every action is taken, the system state 220 may be updated and the queries (which may include writes) may be saved as system state queries 210.14.” [0125], and “As described herein, any time a change occurs, the controller will create a log of it and what was actually executed.” [0363])…
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to combine Sulcer with Schmitt because both references are directed to automated management of cloud-based or virtualized IT infrastructure using a controller/control plane to configure, provision, monitor, and manage computing resources. Sulcer discloses a virtual desktop system in which a control plane manages the lifecycle of virtual desktops and associated cloud infrastructure, including provisioning desktops, managing desktop pools, monitoring managed virtual machines, and orchestrating recovery operations to maintain desktop availability. Schmitt similarly discloses a controller-based IT system that uses global system rules, templates, and system state information to automatically set up, configure, provision, update, migrate, back up, restore, and manage compute, storage, networking, cloud instances, services, and virtual resources. A person of ordinary skill would have been motivated to incorporate Schmitt’s configurable rule-based controller framework, including stored system rules, rule evaluation, execution of corresponding actions, and system-state/diagnostic logging, into Sulcer’s virtual desktop control-plane environment in order to improve automation, reduce manual administrative intervention, maintain accurate configuration and operational state, and enhance reliability and recoverability of the virtual desktop cloud infrastructure. Such a combination would have amounted to the predictable use of known controller-based rule management techniques in Sulcer’s analogous cloud desktop management system to achieve the expected benefit of more automated and reliable lifecycle management of virtual desktop resources.
Tang, in analogous art, teaches wherein each rule includes a triggering event component (“An important method of the present invention is: We will each step in Figure 4A, that is, in each square box Content, seen as an event.” [p.15], “This event can be grouped into five categories: discovery events, hypothetical events, investigation events, conclusion events, and recovery events.” [p.15], and “The monitor event processing agent forms an event column of at least one rule…” [p.39]), a conditional expression component (“State O: if event is found (cannot ping a server) Then { output assumes an event (this failure may be related to the server); Output assumes an event (this failure may be related to the switch); State increase U”, “State 1: if event is found (cannot ping server count >100) Then { output assumes the event (the switch is under maintenance); Output assumes an event (the switch has failed); State increase U”, and “State 2: if event is found (cannot ping server ID is different, that is, large area ping fails) and discovery event (system Log file has ‘failed’ record) Then { output conclusion event (switch failure); Status is 0}” [p. 16]), and an action component (“If exist recovery event (replace the switch) Then { create an alternate switch; Migration Delete faulty switch}” [p.16-17], and “The effector sets the method of the task scheduler to a group method. After the effector quickly judges using the procedural rules, the interrupt service routine interrupt is executed, and the task scheduler is controlled to stop, restart, and stop allocating the time slice until the rush hour passes.” [p.40]), and (v) the diagnostics including conditions that caused a rule evaluation (“Step 607: Search the rule base for the event column that matches the current stimulus.”, “Step 603, according to the semantic knowledge base, translating event data into rules and recording stimuli.” [p.18-19], and “The analyzer event processing agent searches the current event column that matches the stimulus…” [p.39]).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to further modify Sulcer, as modified by Schmitt, with the event-driven autonomic rule-processing teachings of Tang because the combined Sulcer-Schmitt system already provides a controller/control-plane framework for managing virtual desktop and cloud infrastructure resources using configurable rules, templates, system state, and automated execution of management operations, while Tang teaches using event-driven autonomic management and complex event processing to detect events, evaluate conditions, diagnose faults, and execute remediation actions for virtualized network and computing resources. Sulcer seeks to maintain availability of virtual desktops through control-plane orchestration and monitoring of cloud infrastructure, and Schmitt enhances such an environment with configurable rule-based provisioning, management, state tracking, and execution. A person of ordinary skill would have been motivated to incorporate Tang’s event-triggered conditional rule processing and autonomic remediation techniques into the Sulcer-Schmitt virtual desktop management system to improve automated detection, diagnosis, and repair of faults or operating conditions affecting virtual desktops and their supporting cloud infrastructure, thereby reducing manual intervention, decreasing time to repair, and improving reliability and availability of the virtual desktop service. The modification would have involved applying Tang’s known event/condition/action-based autonomic management techniques to the analogous virtualized cloud resources managed by the Sulcer-Schmitt control plane, yielding the predictable result of a more automated and self-managing virtual desktop infrastructure.
Finally, regarding the limitation of “provide diagnostics related to the one or more executed rules to the control plane for further analysis, the diagnostics including conditions that caused a rule evaluation, actions taken, and results and status of a virtual machine after the actions have been taken.” Sulcer, as shown above, discloses a virtual desktop control plane that monitors and analyzes operational data collected from managed virtual machines, including through a monitoring service that receives operational data from agents monitoring resources of the cloud desktop service system, and a desktop management service that interacts with managed virtual machines and agent software installed on those managed virtual machines to perform desktop operations and collect data from the managed virtual machines at the direction of the control plane. Schmitt, as shown above, further teaches that controller-managed rule execution is tracked through system state and logs, including that controller logic reads global system rules, issues instructions to fulfill those rules, and updates system state after actions are taken, thereby recording what operations were performed and the resulting state of managed resources. Tang, as shown above, complements these teachings by disclosing event-driven autonomic management in which event processing agents record stimuli, search event columns matching current stimuli, evaluate diagnostic rules, identify hypotheses and remediation plans, and execute corresponding remediation actions, thereby identifying the conditions or events that caused rule evaluation and the actions selected in response.
Accordingly, in the combined system, Sulcer’s control plane and managed-VM monitoring architecture receives operational and status information from virtual machines, Schmitt’s controller rule framework records executed actions and updated system state, and Tang’s event-driven diagnostic rule processing identifies the triggering conditions and rule-based remediation actions, together teaching diagnostics provided to the control plane for further analysis that include the rule-triggering conditions, actions taken, and resulting virtual-machine status.
Regarding claim 2, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 1, wherein the cloud infrastructure includes at least one gateway virtual machine having a gateway agent, the gateway agent being configured to perform steps (i) through (v) [Tang p.5: “the bottom layer of the hybrid autonomic computing reference architecture includes virtual and physical Network device, the virtual and physical network device exists as a managed resource in the hybrid autonomic computing reference architecture, and some managed resources themselves contain self-managed attributes…”; and p.33: “The logical POD server utilizes autonomous management to implement resource scheduling between push and pull with the software server. The service delivery platform utilizes autonomous management to implement operation competition for resources with multiple logical POD servers, and utilizes autonomous management to achieve competition for resources related to operation requests between multiple user agents (operation request) Competition for resources ). SIP protocol for autonomous virtual networks”].
Regarding claim 3, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 2, wherein steps (iii) through (iv) are performed when the gateway agent loses connectivity to the control plane [Tang describes autonomous agents/EPAs that act locally and event-driven, which implies operation even when disconnected, but does not state this directly.].
Regarding claim 4, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 2, wherein the first configurable set of rules includes a second configurable set of rules defining rules for the gateway agent and a third configurable set of rules defining rules for a desktop agent, and wherein step (ii) involves: storing, by the gateway agent in the gateway virtual machine, only the second configurable set of rules [Tang p5: “Mapping the events in the event-driven process block diagram to an autonomous manager such that the analysis and planning portions of the autonomous manager can be represented by a set of rules,” … “the multi-cycle autonomous manager saves and searches rules in the event processing agent rule base, saves past experience, and automatically learns to obtain new rules;” ].
Regarding claim 5, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 1, wherein the one or more virtual desktops include at least one desktop agent, the desktop agent being configured to perform steps (i) through (v) [Tang p.5: “the bottom layer of the hybrid autonomic computing reference architecture includes virtual and physical Network device, the virtual and physical network device exists as a managed resource in the hybrid autonomic computing reference architecture, and some managed resources themselves contain self-managed attributes;”; p.50: “There are complete local autonomous elements on the managed resource host. The local autonomous elements enable the host to manage itself according to local policies when the connection with the central collection and control system is cut off;”].
Regarding claim 6, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 5, wherein steps (iii) through (iv) are performed when the desktop agent loses connectivity to the control plane [Tang p.31: “Figure 19 Managed Resources 1930a Host 1 has a complete local autonomous element. It enables the host 1 to achieve some degree of self-management based on local policies in the event of a disconnection (e.g., communication failure) with the central acquisition control system 1920. Host 1 is consistent with the autonomous element on the left side of the underlying system architecture in Figure 1.”].
Regarding claim 7, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 5, wherein the first configurable set of rules includes a second configurable set of rules defining rules for a gateway agent and a third configurable set of rules defining rules for the desktop agent, and wherein step (ii) involves: storing, by the desktop agent in the one or more virtual desktops, only the third configurable set of rules [Tang p.39: “The monitor event processing agent forms an event column of at least one rule and is saved in the event processing agent rule base. The analyzer event processing agent searches for the current event column that matches the stimulus, and if successful, matches the score to the most similar hypothesis, otherwise returns to the monitor. The planner event processing agent identifies the target, target parameters, and searches for assumptions that match the target and meta-state. If successful, the failed experience is stored in the rule base and the score is matched to the most similar repair plan, otherwise it returns to the analyzer. The executor event processing agent searches for a remediation plan that matches the policy, and if successful, uses the score to match the best execution plan, otherwise it returns to the planner.”].
Regarding claim 8, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 1, wherein the first configurable set of rules are defined by an administrative user [Tang p.2: “The ACRA autonomous system architecture divides the autonomic computing system into three layers: … The top level contains a coordinating manager that coordinates various resource managers. These coordinating managers themselves have the structure of autonomous management elements, and achieve certain global and system-level management objectives through system-wide large control loops, achieving system-wide autonomous management.”].
Regarding claim 9, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 1, wherein the cloud infrastructure performing step (iv) involves: determining that one or more events has occurred, the one or more events including (a) a scheduled time has arrived, (b) a change in connectivity status between the control plane and the cloud infrastructure has occurred, (c) a modification of a configuration registry, (d) a change of a power status, (e) a request to change the power status, or (f) any combination thereof [Tang p.10: “the sensor implementing process level monitoring, using a multiplexing method, so that the number of monitored events exceeds the number of performance monitoring unit counters The device can still be monitored, and the sensor also implements system level monitoring, including monitoring conversion buffer buffer loss, PCI bus latency and traffic, CPU stall cycles, memory access latency, device access latency, and cache instruction stalls;”].
Regarding claim 10, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 1, wherein the one or more rules include: (a) a rule associated with a health check, (b) a rule associated with a status of a networking service, (c) a rule associated with a power management service, (d) a rule associated with system operations, (e) a rule associated with versioning, (f) a rule associated with network performance, or (g) any combination thereof [Tang p.11: “The MAPE component of the service server is global, and the MAPE component of the logical delivery point server is the server local. The rule base of the MAPE engine of the service server considers the competition of resources between the logical delivery point servers, and also considers the service from the user. demand; Business lifecycle management, business project server processing configuration, activation, deployment, uninstallation, service assurance, business scheduling, and FCAPS management when the business server is oriented to the project operation user;”].
Regarding claim 11, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 1, wherein the one or more actions are included in the one or more rules [Tang p.23: “The VFSM executor tells the service module to start the NEW entry service (service data and service parameters);”].
Regarding claim 12, Sulcer/Schmitt/Tang teaches the system of claim 11, wherein the one or more actions include: (a) raising an alert, (b) rebooting, (c) changing a registry value, (d) powering down a computing system, (e) starting or stopping a process or service, (f) changing a configuration file, (g) clearing a cache, or (h) any combination thereof [Tang p.39: “The effector enters the kernel's interrupt service routine, with kernel ring 0 security permissions and preemption, controls the kernel level ring 1-3 memory manager, peripheral device manager, and task scheduler to terminate, restart, change the time slice Or a live migration process that runs on the operating system or virtual machine without preemptive privileges.”].
Regarding claims 13-19; these claim(s) limitations are significantly similar to those of claim(s) 1-7, 9 and 10; and, thus, are rejected on the same grounds.
Regarding claim 20; these claim(s) limitations are significantly similar to those of claim(s) 1; and, thus, are rejected on the same grounds.
Conclusion
Claims 1-20 are rejected as explained above.
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, 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 extension fee 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 date of this final action.
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/Ramon A. Mercado/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 3658
