Abstract: Generating, configuring, and deploying virtual machines may be a time consuming and mundane process. Accordingly, one or more techniques and/or systems are disclosed for provisioning virtual machines through an automated process. In particular, a centralized manager may receive requests to initialize virtual machines on target hosts. The centralized manager may generate provisioning jobs based upon such requests. Because the virtual machines may initially have generic configurations so that the virtual machines are not tied to particular target hosts and/or subnets, the centralized manager may retrieve virtual machine personalities for the virtual machines. The centralized manager may send provisioning jobs to provisioning virtual applications located throughout a network computing environment. A provisioning job may instruct a provisioning virtual application to initialize a virtual machine on a target host using a virtual machine personality.

Abstract: A common interface and communication methodology are provided for interaction between the components of a storage area network for them to activate “triggers” that cause actions to be taken by the devices to utilize copy service functions to create additional copies of data, and to potentially route load to other resources. The actions can be taken by any of the elements of the storage area network to mitigate the impact of the pending failure. The advantage of this system over current methods is that it can detect both failure and impending failure in any component in the system and use resources in any other component to mitigate the failure. This creates a much more comprehensive recovery strategy and the potential to save more data than in current systems.

Abstract: A common interface and communication methodology are provided for interaction between the components of a storage area network for them to activate “triggers” that cause actions to be taken by the devices to utilize copy service functions to create additional copies of data, and to potentially route load to other resources. The actions can be taken by any of the elements of the storage area network to mitigate the impact of the pending failure. The advantage of this system over current methods is that it can detect both failure and impending failure in any component in the system and use resources in any other component to mitigate the failure. This creates a much more comprehensive recovery strategy and the potential to save more data than in current systems.