Cisco Technology, Inc.

Deepak Cherian

Samar Sharma

Pirabhu Raman

Hariharan Balasubramanian

Manish Chandra Agrawal

Ramprasad Nagaraja Rao

A switch/switching fabric is configured to load balance traffic. The switch fabric includes a plurality of switches. A packet is received at a first switch of the plurality of switches. The first switch load balances the packet to a particular entity among a plurality of entities. Each of the entities is connected to one of the plurality of switches. The first switch determines a particular switch of the plurality of switches to which the packet should be directed, the particular entity being connected to the particular switch of the plurality of switches. The particular switch receives the packet, and determines which interface of the particular switch to direct the packet to the particular entity. The plurality of entities include servers and network appliances as physical devices or virtual machines.

Switch fabric based load balancing

In one embodiment, a method includes receiving a packet at an input port of a network device, the input port having a plurality of queues with at least one queue for each output port at the network device, identifying a port group for transmitting the packet from the network device, the port group having a plurality of members each associated with one of the output ports, and selecting one of the queues based on utilization of the members. An apparatus for load balancing is also disclosed.

Growing community of inventors

Newark, CA, United States of America

Deepak Cherian