SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SUPPORTING CHANGE NOTIFY WATCHES FOR VIRTUALIZED STORAGE SYSTEMS

A technique supports Change Notify watches in virtualized storage systems. In particular, techniques of the present invention advantageously emulate Change Notify features (e.g., as documented by the CIFS protocol) on virtualized storage systems by leveraging virtualization mapping information (e.g., an inode-to-path or “I2P” mapping) to walk a file system tree backwards from the data blocks to their ancestors to determine whether there are applicable watches on ancestor directories, and to obtain a pathname (e.g., relative) of the watched (changed) data. In particular, changes to data received from different protocols (e.g., CIFS, NFS, HTTP, etc.) can trigger watches to clients on the virtualized storage system. Also, performance may be enhanced using various caching techniques, and watch state may be retained while moving watched data across volumes of the virtualized storage system.