MULTI-PATH VIRTUAL SWITCHING

• US 20170289067A1
• Filed: 04/04/2016
• Published: 10/05/2017
• Est. Priority Date: 04/04/2016
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Futurewei Technologies Incorporated (Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd.)
• Original Assignee: Futurewei Technologies Incorporated (Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd.)
• Inventors: Lu, Yunsong, Zhou, Wenzhe, Chen, Yan
• Granted Patent: US 10,523,598 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0654 using network fault recovery ring fault isolation or reconfiguration in loop networks without recovery actions by a network management system H04L12/437
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0895 Configuration of virtualised networks or elements, e.g. virtualised network function or OpenFlow elements
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0896 Bandwidth or capacity management, i.e. automatically increasing or decreasing capacities flow or congestion control using dynamic resource allocation, e.g. in-call renegotiation, H04L47/76
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/24 Multipath
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/28 using route fault recovery
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/586 of virtual routers
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/125 by balancing the load, e.g. traffic engineering
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/24 Traffic characterised by specific attributes, e.g. priority or QoS
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 49/354 for supporting virtual local area networks [VLAN]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 49/70 Virtual switches

Abstract

A virtual switch for packet switching includes an ingress traffic steering manager executing on circuitry and coupled to receive packets from multiple virtual machines or containers, multiple data plane providers, each data plane provider having a data path coupled to selectively receive the packets from the ingress traffic steering manager, and wherein the ingress traffic steering manager classifies the received packets and selects available data paths based on the classification of the packets and a set of distribution rules.

Claims

1. A virtual switch for packet switching, the switch comprising:

an ingress traffic steering manager executing on circuitry and coupled to receive packets from multiple virtual machines or containers;

multiple data plane providers, each data plane provider having a data path coupled to selectively receive the packets from the ingress traffic steering manager; and

wherein the ingress traffic steering manager classifies the received packets and selects available data paths based on the classification of the packets and a set of distribution rules.

2. The virtual switch of claim 1 wherein at least one data plane provider comprises a hardware accelerator.

3. The virtual switch of claim 2 wherein the ingress traffic steering manager offloads received packet classification to the hardware accelerator.

4. The virtual switch of claim 1 wherein at least one data plane provider comprises a software accelerator stored on a storage device and executable from the storage device on the circuitry.

5. The virtual switch of claim 1 wherein the ingress traffic steering manager selects available data paths as a function of latency, throughput, jitter, or other requirements of the data traffic.

6. The virtual switch of claim 1 and further comprising a virtual network interface card coupled to each data plane provider to couple the data plane provider to the virtual machines or containers.

7. The virtual switch of claim 6 wherein the data planes each comprise multiple ports to couple the data planes to route packets via the virtual network interface card to the virtual machines or containers.

8. The virtual switch of claim 1 wherein the distribution rules are a function of maximum quality of service and load balancing of packet traffic flows among the data planes.

9. The virtual switch of claim 1 wherein packet classification is performed as a function of parsing packet headers, a function of an origin of the packet, or both.

10. A method comprising:

receiving packets at an instance of an ingress traffic steering manager executing on circuitry, the packets being received from multiple virtual machines or containers;

classifying the received packets;

selecting a data path for each packet based on the classification of the packets and a set of distribution rules, the data path being selected from multiple separate data plane providers, each data plane provider having a data path; and

forwarding each packet to the selected data path for forwarding to one of the multiple virtual machines or containers.

11. The method of claim 10 wherein the data path is selected from a list of available data paths, and further comprising:

detecting a broken data path; and

removing a broken data path from the list of available data paths.

12. The method of claim 11 wherein at least one data plane provider comprises a hardware accelerator.

13. The method of claim 12 wherein the ingress traffic steering manager offloads received packet classification to the hardware accelerator.

14. The method of claim 10 wherein at least one data plane provider comprises a software accelerator stored on a storage device and executable from the storage device on the circuitry.

15. The method of claim 10 wherein the ingress traffic steering manager selects available data paths as a function of latency requirements of the packets.

16. The method of claim 10 wherein the distribution rules are a function of maximum quality of service and load balancing of packet traffic flows among the data planes.

17. The method of claim 10 wherein packet classification is performed as a function of parsing packet headers, a function of an origin of the packet, or both.

18. A computer readable storage device having instruction stored thereon for execution by a computer to perform operations comprising:

receiving packets at an instance of an ingress traffic steering manager executing on circuitry, the packets being received from multiple virtual machines or containers;

classifying the received packets;

selecting a data path for each packet based on the classification of the packets and a set of distribution rules, the data path being selected from multiple separate data plane providers, each data plane provider having a data path; and

forwarding each packet to the selected data path for forwarding to one of the multiple virtual machines or containers.

19. The computer readable storage device of claim 18 wherein the data path is selected from a list of available data paths, and wherein the operations further comprise:

detecting a broken data path; and

removing a broken data path from the list of available data paths.

20. The computer readable storage device of claim 18 wherein at least one data plane provider comprises a hardware accelerator and wherein at least one data plane provider comprises a software data plane provider.