Network switch systems including logical switches

• US 10,277,535 B2
• Filed: 03/31/2017
• Issued: 04/30/2019
• Est. Priority Date: 03/31/2017
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Company)
• Original Assignee: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Company)
• Inventors: Kamath, Harish B, Hegde, Vijay vishwanath, Witkowski, Michael Lee
• Primary Examiner(s): Jiang, Charles C
• Assistant Examiner(s): Kavleski, Ryan C
• Application Number:
  US15/475,356
• Publication Number:
  US 20180287966A1
• Time in Patent Office: 760 Days
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45562 Creating, deleting, cloning virtual machine instances
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45595 Network integration; Enabling network access in virtual machine instances
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/4641 Virtual LANs, VLANs, e.g. virtual private networks [VPN] LAN interconnection over a bridge based backbone H04L12/462; encapsulation techniques H04L12/4633; routing of packets H04L45/00; packet switches H04L49/00; virtual private networks for security H04L63/0272
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/64 using an overlay routing layer
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 49/70 Virtual switches

Abstract

An example system in accordance with an aspect of the present disclosure includes a logical switch and a controller to dynamically instantiate the logical switch including a control plane isolated from other logical switches of the network switch system. The logical switch includes a protocol stack independent of and isolated from other logical switches of the network switch system.

Claims

1. A network switch system comprising:

a controller; and

a plurality of logical switches dynamically instantiated by the controller as a plurality of containerized switch stacks to meet dynamic service needs, wherein a given logical switch includes a control plane and a protocol stack isolated from other logical switches of the network switch system to logically isolate and partition the given logical switch at an application level;

wherein the controller is to run the plurality of logical switches in a chassis-based infrastructure to provide a logical switch per tenant in a multi-tenant environment, and wherein the controller is to provide a composable architecture to add or remove different personalities dynamically over time.

2. The network switch system of claim 1, further comprising a plurality of network ports, wherein the controller is to assign a network port to the given logical switch such that the assigned network port is isolated from other logical switches, and wherein the assigned network port is bound to the logical switch to provide traffic containment within the logical switch.

3. The network switch system of claim 1, wherein the controller is based on container technology of a Linux-based OpenSwitch network operating system (NOS), to isolate processes and domains executed within a containerized switch stack.

4. The network switch system of claim 1, wherein the given logical switch includes a composition of control plane, data plane, and management plane resources, wherein the control plane and data plane resources of the logical switch are isolated from other logical switches, and wherein the management plane resources are to support interactions with an external management plane entity.

5. The network switch system of claim 4, further comprising:

a sampled flow (sFLow) service container to perform sFlow operations across a plurality of logical switches of the network switch system.

6. The network switch system of claim 5, wherein the sFlow service container is to report sFlow data based on at least one of i) a sub-agent basis of data per logical switch, and ii) a device basis of data per physical network switch system.

7. The network sfwitch system of claim 1, wherein the controller is to create internal Virtual LAN (VLAN) or Private Virtual LAN (PVLAN) connections for the logical switch, to provide traffic isolation and prevent violation of isolation rules for the given logical switch.

8. The network switch system of claim 1, further comprising a connection, based on a Linux process connection, between containerized logical switches, to enable protocol communication between containerized logical switches.

9. The network switch system of claim 1, wherein the given logical switch is instantiated as at least one of:

i) a top of rack (TOR) switch to behave as a physical OpenSwitch-based switch;

ii) a virtual connect (VC) profiled switch to behave as an OpenSwitch carrying virtual connect profiles on its logical device resources;

iii) a Fiber Channel/Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FC/FCoE) gateway to present capabilities for storage-area network (SAN) connectivity; and

iv) a software-defined networking (SDN) switch wherein network flows are defined by an SDN controller based on OpenFlow.

10. The network switch system of claim 9, wherein the given logical switch is instantiated as the SDN switch, and is profiled based on obtaining definitions, switching data table, and media access control (MAC) table entries from an external SDN controller.

11. The network switch system of claim 1, wherein the controller is initialized based on an open network initialization environment (ONIE) boot loader mechanism to dynamically load an operating system for the network switch system to support containerized logical switches and implementation of a logical switch manager by the controller to manage container lifecycles.

12. The network switch system of claim 1, wherein switch hardware of the network switch system includes a control plane register set, wherein a given control plane register set corresponds to the given logical switch to enable the control plane of the given logical switch to make use of the control plane register set.

13. The network switch system of claim 1, wherein the plurality of logical switches are to support interactions between their containerized services and external management plane entities, while remaining isolated from each other.

14. The network switch system of claim 1, wherein data plane services of the network switch system operate at a physical device level and are shared by the plurality of logical switches.

15. The network switch system of claim 1, further comprising an Open vSwitch Daemon accessible by a corresponding one of the plurality of logical switches.

16. The network switch system of claim 1, wherein different ones of the plurality of logical switches are instantiated dynamically at different points over time to provide a composable personality of the network switch system.

17. A method of instantiating a logical switch of a network switch system, comprising:

preparing a default container by initializing a common set of services, which are common to the network switch system;

instantiating each logical switch to be configured, based on a container list of containers to be configured and a network list of internal networks to be created per container; and

preparing switch buffer resources across the network switch system,

for each containerized logical switch to be instantiated;

establishing logical switch references in an open virtual switch database (OVSDB);

obtaining container profile information from the OVSDB;

establishing logical switch identities;

applying port protection attributes for each port listed for the containerized logical switch;

establishing an internal network for the containerized logical switch;

enabling switch services based on a container profile description for the containerized logical switch; and

enforcing a switch-specific configuration as obtained from the OVSDB.