FLOW-CONTROL WITHIN A HIGH-PERFORMANCE, SCALABLE AND DROP-FREE DATA CENTER SWITCH FABRIC

摘要

A high-performance, scalable and drop-free data center switch fabric and infrastructure is described. The data center switch fabric may leverage low cost, off-the-shelf packet-based switching components (e.g., IP over Ethernet (IPoE)) and overlay forwarding technologies rather than proprietary switch fabric. In one example, host network accelerators (HNAs) are positioned between servers (e.g., virtual machines or dedicated servers) of the data center and an IPoE core network that provides point-to-point connectivity between the servers. The HNAs are hardware devices that embed virtual routers on one or more integrated circuits, where the virtual router are configured to extend the one or more virtual networks to the virtual machines and to seamlessly transport packets over the switch fabric using an overlay network. In other words, the HNAs provide hardware-based, seamless access interfaces to overlay technologies used for communicating packet flows through the core switching network of the data center.

主权项

1. A network system comprising:
a switch fabric comprising a plurality of switches interconnected to form a physical network, wherein the switches provide connectionless packet-based switching for packets through the switch fabric; a plurality of servers interconnected by the switch fabric, wherein each of the servers comprises an operating environment executing one or more virtual machines in communication via the one or more virtual networks; and a plurality of host network accelerators, a host network accelerator of the host network accelerators comprising: a hardware-based virtual router configured to extend the one or more virtual networks to the operating environments of the virtual machines; and a flow control unit configured to allocate bandwidth among the plurality of host network accelerators based at least on an amount of data to be transmitted by each of the plurality of host network accelerators.