Nicira, Inc.

Vmware, Inc.

Wmware, Inc.

Niciria, Inc.

Anirban Sengupta

Jayant Jain

Subrahmanyam Manuguri

Mohan Parthasarathy

Xinhua Hong

Rick Lund

Alok S Tiagi

Srinivas Nimmagadda

Jingmin Zhou

Mike Parsa

Raju Koganty

Serge Maskalik

Mani Kancherla

Sami Boutros

Kausum Kumar

Azeem Feroz

Allwyn M Sequeira

Sachin Mohan Vaidya

Todd Sabin

Chidambareswaran Raman

Uday Suresh Masurekar

Weiqing Wu

Kai-Wei Fan

Pankaj Thakkar

Ganesan Chandrashekhar

Yong Wang

Alexander Tessmer

Sirisha Myneni

James Christopher Wiese

Ly Loi

Mitchell T Christensen

Sushruth Gopal

Sunitha Krishna

Brenden Blanco

Kaushal Bansal

Debashis Basak

Sreeram Kumar Ravinoothala

Anand Girish Parthasarathy

Aravind Srinivasan

Shadab Shah

Laxmikant Vithal Gunda

Amit Chopra

Arnold Poon

Jerome Catrouillet

Minjal Agarwal

Sri Mohana Singamsetty

Liwen Wu

Sandesh Sawant

Vinayak Shashikant Naik

Andre Khan

David Lorenzo

Nishant Jain

Vivek Agarwal

Craig Farley Newell

Mukesh Hira

Adam Stephen Rykowski

Mayank Agarwal

Farzad Ghannadian

Sushil Kumar Singh

Ravishankar Chamarajnagar

Sagar Date

Sulay Shah

Nafisa Mandliwala

Jeremy Olmsted-Thompson

Leung Tao Kwok

Russell Lu

Vedant Saran

Jerry Pereira

Karen Hayrapetyan

Sameer Kurkure

Sridhar Kommireddy

Utkarsh Singh

Deepa Kalani

Ashot Aslanyan

Makarand Bhonsle

Aman Raj

A novel method for stateful packet classification that uses hardware resources for performing stateless lookups and software resources for performing stateful connection flow handshaking is provided. To classify an incoming packet from a network, some embodiments perform stateless look up operations for the incoming packet in hardware and forward the result of the stateless look up to the software. The software in turn uses the result of the stateless look up to perform the stateful connection flow handshaking and to determine the result of the stateful packet classification.

Use of stateless marking to speed up stateful firewall rule processing

Systems and techniques are described for monitoring network communications using a distributed firewall. One of the techniques includes receiving, at a driver executing in a guest operating system of a virtual machine, a request to open a network connection from a process associated with a user, wherein the driver performs operations comprising: obtaining identity information for the user; providing the identity information and data identifying the network connection to an identity module external to the driver; and receiving, by a distributed firewall, data associating the identity information with the data identifying the network connection from the identity module, wherein the distributed firewall performs operations comprising: receiving an outgoing packet from the virtual machine; determining that the identity information corresponds to the outgoing packet; and evaluating one or more routing rules based at least in part on the identity information.

Distributed identity-based firewalls

In order to enable dynamic scaling of network services at the edge, novel systems and methods are provided to enable addition of add new nodes or removal of existing nodes while retaining the affinity of the flows through the stateful services. The methods provide a cluster of network nodes that can be dynamically resized to handle and process network traffic that utilizes stateful network services. The existing traffic flows through the edge continue to function during and after the changes to membership of the cluster. All nodes in the cluster operate in active-active mode, i.e., they are receiving and processing traffic flows, thereby maximizing the utilization of the available processing power.

Stateful services on stateless clustered edge

Described herein are systems, methods, and software to enhance network traffic management. In one implementation, a first host identifies a packet to be transferred from a first virtual machine on the first host to a second virtual machine on a second host. In response to identifying the packet, the first host identifies a source logical port for the first virtual machine, and transferring a communication to the second host, wherein the communication encapsulates the data packet and the source logical port. Once the packet is received by the second host, the second host may use the source logical port to determine a forwarding action for the packet.

Managing network traffic in virtual switches based on logical port identifiers

A novel method for dynamic network service allocation that maps generic services into specific configurations of service resources in a network is provided. An application that is assigned to be performed by computing resources in the network is associated with a set of generic services, and the method maps the set of generic services to the service resources based on the assignment of the application to the computing resources. The mapping of generic services is further based on a level of service that is chosen for the application, where the set of generic services are mapped to different sets of network resources according to different levels of services.

Provisioning network services in a software defined data center

Some embodiments of the invention provide novel methods for facilitating a distributed SNAT (dSNAT) middlebox service operation for a first network at a host computer in the first network on which the dSNAT middlebox service operation is performed and a gateway device between the first network and a second network. The novel methods enable dSNAT that provides stateful SNAT at multiple host computers, thus avoiding the bottleneck problem associated with providing stateful SNAT at gateways and also significantly reduces the need to redirect packets received at the wrong host by using a capacity of off-the-shelf gateway devices to perform IPV6 encapsulation for IPv4 packets and assigning locally unique IPv6 addresses to each host executing a dSNAT middlebox service instance that are used by the gateway device.

Facilitating distributed SNAT service

For a network including multiple computers acting as tunnel endpoints in a network, some embodiments provide a method for processing data messages in parallel using multiple processors (e.g., cores) of each computer. Each computer in some embodiments has a set of interfaces configured as tunnel endpoints connecting to multiple tunnels. In some embodiments, the multiple processors encrypt data messages according to a set of encryption parameters or multiple sets of encryption parameters that specify an encryption policy for data messages requiring encryption, an encryption algorithm, an encryption key, a destination network address, and an encryption-parameter-set identifier.

Scaling gateway to gateway traffic using flow hash

Some embodiments of the invention provide a method for forwarding data messages between a client and a server (e.g., between client and server machines and/or applications). In some embodiments, the method receives a data message that a load balancer has directed from a particular client to a particular server after selecting the particular server from a set of several candidate servers for the received data message's flow. The method stores an association between an identifier associated with the load balancer and a flow identifier associated with the message flow, and then forwards the received data message to the particular server. The method subsequently uses the load balancer identifier in the stored association to forward to the particular load balancer a data message that is sent by the particular server. The method of some embodiments is implemented by an intervening forwarding element (e.g., a router) between the load balancer set and the server set.

Policy-based forwarding to a load balancer of a load balancing cluster

A method of collecting health check metrics for a network is provided. The method, at a deep packet inspector on a physical host in a datacenter, receives a copy of a network packet from a load balancer. The packet includes a plurality of layers. Each layer corresponds to a communication protocol in a plurality of communication protocols. The method identifies an application referenced in the packet. The method analyzes the information in one or more layers of the packet to determine metrics for the source application. The method sends the determined metrics to the load balancer.

Automatic health check and performance monitoring for applications and protocols using deep packet inspection in a datacenter

Some embodiments provide a novel method for load balancing data messages that are sent by a source compute node (SCN) to one or more different groups of destination compute nodes (DCNs). In some embodiments, the method deploys a load balancer in the source compute node's egress datapath. This load balancer receives each data message sent from the source compute node, and determines whether the data message is addressed to one of the DCN groups for which the load balancer spreads the data traffic to balance the load across (e.g., data traffic directed to) the DCNs in the group. When the received data message is not addressed to one of the load balanced DCN groups, the load balancer forwards the received data message to its addressed destination. On the other hand, when the received data message is addressed to one of load balancer's DCN groups, the load balancer identifies a DCN in the addressed DCN group that should receive the data message, and directs the data message to the identified DCN. To direct the data message to the identified DCN, the load balancer in some embodiments changes the destination address (e.g., the destination IP address, destination port, destination MAC address, etc.) in the data message from the address of the identified DCN group to the address (e.g., the destination IP address) of the identified DCN.

Inline load balancing

In some embodiments, a method receives a packet at an instance of a distributed firewall associated with one of a plurality of workloads running on a hypervisor. Each of the plurality of workloads has an associated instance of the distributed firewall. An index table is accessed for the workload where the index table includes a set of references to a set of rules in a rules table. Each workload in the plurality of workloads is associated with an index table that references rules that are applicable to each respective workload. The method then accesses at least one rule in a set of rules associated with the set of references from the rules table and compares one or more attributes for the packet to information stored for the at least one rule in the set of rules to determine a rule in the set of rules to apply to the packet.

Sharing of firewall rules among multiple workloads in a hypervisor

In some embodiments, a method stores a plurality of identifiers for a plurality of rules. The plurality of rules each include a set of patterns, and a rule and a pattern combination is associated with an identifier in the plurality of identifiers. Information being sent on a network is scanned and the method determines when a pattern in the information matches a pattern for a rule. The method identifies an identifier for the pattern where the identifier identifies a rule and a pattern combination. Then, the method identifies the rule and the pattern combination based on the identifier. The set of patterns for the rule is found in the information based on determining that the rule and the pattern combinations for the rule have been found in the information.

String pattern matching for multi-string pattern rules in intrusion detection

Some embodiments of the invention provide a novel network architecture for providing edge services of a virtual private cloud (VPC) at host computers hosting machines of the VPC. The host computers in the novel network architecture are reachable from external networks through a gateway router of an availability zone (AZ). The gateway router receives a data message from the external network addressed to one or more data compute nodes (DCNs) in the VPC and forwards the data message to a particular host computer identified as providing a distributed edge service for the VPC. The particular host computer, upon receiving the forwarded data message, performs the distributed edge service and provides the serviced data message to a destination DCN.

Method for providing distributed gateway service at host computer

In some embodiments, a method instantiates a proxy that stores first state information for first workloads running on a first computing device. The first computing device receives a migrated workload from a second computing device and second state information for a session associated with the migrated workload. The second state information is generated by a proxy on the second computing device that processed one or more packets for the migrated workload on the second computing device. The method stories the second state information for the proxy on the first computing device and resumes the session associated with the migrated workload using the proxy on the first computing device.

Distributed inline proxy

Growing community of inventors

Saratoga, CA, United States of America

Anirban Sengupta