Cisco Technology, Inc.

Cesare Cantu

Anant Deepak

Mike Galles

Michael Brian Galles

Anuraag Mittal

Akshya Kumar Singh

Srinivas Sardar

Techniques are presented herein for receipt/transmission of packets to/from a host via a connected input/output (IO) device. In general, a packet is associated with a payload, an inner packet header, and an outer overlay header. The IO device is configured to perform independent offload operations on the inner packet header and the outer overlay header.

Offload operations for overlay networks

In a data center computing system, multiple nested hypervisors are run, including an outer hypervisor and at least one inner hypervisor running as a virtual machine on top of the outer hypervisor. A guest operating system is run as a virtual machine in the innermost hypervisor. An emulated network interface card device is executed in all hypervisors. An extender component is executed in the outer hypervisor and an extender component is executed in the inner hypervisors such that the extender components in the outer hypervisor and in the inner hypervisors are architecturally cascaded. An interface for the guest operating system is assigned to the emulated network interface card device in each of the outer hypervisor and the inner hypervisors to enable network communications to bypass the outer hypervisor and the inner hypervisors.

Network interface card device pass-through with multiple nested hypervisors

A notification from a source host is received at a network interface device that indicates that a data packet is ready for transmission to a destination host. The data packet may be transmitted to the destination host via the network interface device, and a first completion queue event is generated. The first completion queue event may be used as a trigger to re-transmit the data packet to a port mirroring destination via the network interface device. In another example, a network interface device receives a data packet transmitted from a source host to a destination host. A first completion queue event is generated based on the receipt of the packet, and is used as a trigger to re-transmit the data packet to a port mirroring destination via the network interface device.

Port mirroring at a network interface device

A network appliance that is part of a distributed virtual switch collects network flow information for network flows passing through the network appliance. The network flow information is encapsulated into packets as a data record for transport. Network flow exporter type information is added to the network flow records configured to indicate that the packets are from a distributed exporter. An option template is sent to the network flow data collectors that includes a device identifier that is configured to uniquely identify the network appliance. The packets are exported to the network flow data collector. The network flow data collector uses the network flow exporter type information and the device identifier to associate the network flow information with the distributed virtual switch.

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Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Cesare Cantu