US Patent 10073656 Systems and methods for storage virtualization

An I/O manager may be configured to service I/O requests pertaining to ephemeral data of a virtual machine using a storage device that is separate from and/or independent of a primary storage resource to which the I/O request is directed. Ephemeral data may be removed from ephemeral storage in response to a removal condition and/or trigger, such as a virtual machine reboot. The I/O manager may manage transfers of ephemeral virtual machine data in response to virtual machines migrating between host computing devices. The I/O manager may be further configured to cache virtual machine data, and/or manage shared file data that is common to two or more virtual machines operating on a host computing device.