Nicira, Inc.

Vmware, Inc.

Donghai Han

Jianjun Shen

Hua Wang

Caixia Jiang

Qiong Wang

Pankaj Thakkar

Jingchun Jason Jiang

Da Wan

Wenfeng Liu

Yusheng Wang

Danting Liu

Qi Wu

Ziyou Wang

Xiaoyan Jin

Zhengsheng Zhou

Xin Wang

Anupam Chanda

Qiao Huang

Ye Luo

Xu Wang

Justin Pettit

Feng Pan

Xi Cheng

Somik Behera

Mengdie Song

Benli Ye

Ganesan Chandrashekhar

Raju Koganty

Qian Sun

Vadim Egorov

Corentin Derbois

Dongrui Mo

Frank Pan

Jia Cheng

Ronghua Zhang

Chidambareswaran Raman

Akhila Naveen

Wenyu Zhang

Quan Tian

Rui Cao

Vicky Liu

Wei Lu

Rahul Korivi Subramaniyam

Anuprem Chalvadi

Aditi Ghag

Ming Shu

Haoran Chen

Jianwei Ma

Kai Su

Abhishek Raut

Salvatore Orlando

Juntao Gao

Yuanhui Wang

Qiaoyan Hou

Meiwen Li

Hongshun Chang

Vladimir Cherepanov

Maxim Novikov

Bo Lin

Tao Ma

Mukesh Hira

Wen Liu

Ram Dular Singh

Wenyi Jiang

Xiao Bi Liang

Shudong Zhou

Lan Luo

Chaitanya Kodeboyina

Yuping Wei

Ayyappan Veeraiyan

Yi Zeng

Hang Yan

Bolt Zhang

Dongping Chen

Feng Gu

Lele Zhang

Ran Gu

Xinghua Hu

Xin Qi

Honggang Liu

Yves Fauser

Xinyang Liu

Jingfeng Zhang

Gary Kotton

Tao Zou

Jin Liu

Akash Gangil

Sai Chaitanya

Guofeng Zhu

Zhi Feng Xia

Mojiong Qiu

Jinjun Gao

Xiaopei Liu

Jackie Lan

Jianwei Sui

Kejia Cui

Jiajing Hu

Yang Ding

Wu Qi

Example methods and systems for media access control (MAC) address assignment for virtual network interface cards (VNICs) are described. One example may involve a first computer system may determining a first MAC address portion that is uniquely associated with the first computer system. A first VNIC may be assigned with a first MAC address that includes (a) the first MAC address portion and (b) a third MAC address portion that is uniquely associated with the first VNIC on the first computer system. A second VNIC may be assigned with a second MAC address that includes (a) the first MAC address portion and (b) a fourth MAC address portion that is uniquely associated with the second VNIC on the first computer system. The first computer system may perform traffic handling by processing packets specifying the first MAC address or the second MAC address.

Media access control (MAC) address assignment for virtual network interface cards (VNICS)

Systems and methods for exchanging network information between member clusters include configuring a gateway pool of a member cluster, the gateway pool comprising a plurality of gateway nodes, the member cluster comprising the plurality of gateway nodes and one or more nodes, configuring a gateway node of the plurality of gateway nodes as an active gateway node for the member cluster, writing member cluster information to a storage, the member cluster information indicating address information of the gateway node, reading second member cluster information from the storage, the second member cluster information indicating address information of a gateway node of a second member cluster, establishing a tunnel between the gateway node and the second gateway node based on the second member cluster information, and communicating network traffic from at least one node of the member cluster to at least one node of the second member cluster via the tunnel.

Cross cluster connectivity

Some embodiments provide a method of implementing service rules for a container cluster that is configured by a first SDN controller cluster. The method registers for event notification from an application programming interface (API) server to receive notification regarding events associated with resources deployed in the container cluster. The method forwards to a second SDN controller cluster resource identifiers collected through the registration for resources of the container cluster. The second SDN controller cluster defines service policies that are not defined by the first SDN controller cluster. The method receives, from the second SDN controller cluster, service policies defined by the second SDN controller cluster based on the resource identifiers. The method distributes service rules defined based on the service policies to network elements in the container cluster to enforce on data messages associated with machines deployed in the container cluster configured by the first SDN controller cluster.

Implementing defined service policies in a third-party container cluster

Some embodiments provide a method for performing data traffic monitoring. The method processes a packet through a packet processing pipeline that includes multiple stages. At a filtering stage, the method tags the packet with a set of monitoring actions for subsequent stages to perform on the packet based on a determination that the packet matches a particular filter. For each stage of a set of packet processing stages subsequent to the filtering stage, the method (i) executes any monitoring actions specified for the stage to perform on the packet and (ii) sends the packet to a next stage in the packet processing pipeline.

Tagging packets for monitoring and analysis

Some embodiments provide a method for using a first SDN controller as a Network Controller as a Service (NCaaS). The first SDN controller receives a first set of network attributes regarding network elements in a first container cluster configured by a second SDN controller, and a second set of network attributes regarding network elements in a second container cluster configured by a third SDN controller. These container clusters do not have a controller for defining particular network policies. Based on the sets of network attributes, the first SDN controller defines the particular network policies to control forwarding data messages between the first and second container clusters. The first SDN controller distributes at least a subset of the particular network policies to the first container cluster in order for network elements at the first container cluster to enforce on data messages exchanged between the first and second container clusters.

Network controller as a service (NCaaS) to define network policies for third-party container clusters

In an embodiment, a computer-implemented method for dynamically exchanging runtime state data between datacenters with a gateway using a controller bridge is disclosed. In an embodiment, the method comprises: receiving one or more first runtime state data from one or more logical sharding central control planes ('CCPs') controlling one or more logical sharding hosts; receiving one or more second runtime state data from a gateway that is controlled by a CCP that also controls one or more physical sharding hosts; aggregating to aggregated runtime state data, the one or more first runtime state data received from the one or more logical sharding CCPs and the one or more second runtime state data received from the gateway; determining updated runtime state data based on the aggregated runtime state data, the one or more first runtime state data, and the one or more second runtime state data; and transmitting the updated runtime state data to at least one of the one or more logical sharding CCPs and the gateway.

Exchanging runtime state information between datacenters with a gateway using a controller bridge

Some embodiments provide an automated method for defining externally routable Pods within a Kubernetes cluster. In some embodiments, the Pod operates in a guest cluster has its own VPC (virtual private cloud) network in a datacenter with several other guest clusters that have their own VPC networks and their own set of managers. In some embodiments, a Pod within a GC can be made externally routable so that it can be directly addressable from an external client outside of the Pod's network by using two new Kubernetes CRDs (custom resource definitions), which are an IPPool CRD and a RouteSet CRD. Examples of such external clients include VMs or Pods in another GC or a supervisor cluster connected to the particular GC through a gateway, or from a machine outside of the network of all of the GCs or SC.

Using CRDs to create externally routable addresses and route records for pods

An example method of distributed load balancing in a virtualized computing system includes: configuring, at a logical load balancer, a traffic detector to detect traffic to a virtual internet protocol address (VIP) of an application having a plurality of instances; detecting, at the traffic detector, a first request to the VIP from a client executing in a virtual machine (VM) supported by a hypervisor executing on a first host; sending, by a configuration distributor of the logical load balancer in response to the detecting, a load balancer configuration to a configuration receiver of a local load balancer executing in the hypervisor for configuring the local load balancer to perform load balancing for the VIP at the hypervisor using the load balancer configuration.

Deploying a distributed load balancer in a virtualized computing system

Example methods are provided for a destination host to implement a firewall in a virtualized computing environment that includes the destination host and a source host. The method may comprise receiving, via a physical network interface controller (PNIC) of the destination host, an ingress packet sent by the source host. The ingress packet may be destined for a destination virtualized computing instance that is supported by the destination host and associated with a destination virtual network interface controller (VNIC). The method may further comprise retrieving a PNIC-level firewall rule associated with the destination virtualized computing instance, the PNIC-level firewall rule being applicable at the PNIC and generated by based on a VNIC-level firewall rule applicable at the destination VNIC. In response to determination that the PNIC-level firewall rule blocks the ingress packet from passing through, the ingress packet may be dropped such that the ingress packet is not sent to the destination VNIC.

Firewall in a virtualized computing environment using physical network interface controller (PNIC) level firewall rules

Some embodiments of the invention provide a method for deploying network elements for a set of machines in a set of one or more datacenters. The datacenter set is part of one availability zone in some embodiments. The method receives intent-based API (Application Programming Interface) requests, and parses these API requests to identify a set of network elements to connect and/or perform services for the set of machines. In some embodiments, the API is a hierarchical document that can specify multiple different compute and/or network elements at different levels of compute and/or network element hierarchy. The method performs automated processes to define a virtual private cloud (VPC) to connect the set of machines to a logical network that segregates the set of machines from other machines in the datacenter set. In some embodiments, the set of machines include virtual machines and containers, the VPC is defined with a supervisor cluster namespace, and the API requests are provided as YAML files.

Defining services for virtual interfaces of workloads

A method for network address management is provided. Embodiments include determining a creation of a namespace associated with a cluster of computing devices, wherein a subset of computing resources of the cluster of computing devices is allocated to the namespace. Embodiments include assigning, to the namespace, a network address pool comprising a plurality of network addresses in a subnet, wherein the assigning causes the plurality of network addresses to be reserved exclusively for the namespace. Embodiments include receiving an indication that a pod is added to the namespace. Embodiments include, in response to the receiving of the indication, assigning a network address from the network address pool to the pod.

Dynamic network address management

Some embodiments of the invention provide a method of performing layer 7 (L7) packet processing for a set of Pods executing on a host computer, the set of Pods managed by a container orchestration platform. The method is performed at the host computer. The method receives notification of a creation of a traffic control (TC) custom resource (CR) that is defined by reference to a TC custom resource definition (CRD). The method identifies a set of interfaces of a set of one or more managed forwarding elements (MFEs) executing on the host computer that are candidate interfaces for receiving flows that need to be directed based on the TC CR to a layer 7 packet processor. Based on the identified set of interfaces, the method provides a set of flow records to the set of MFEs to process in order to direct a subset of flows that the set of MFEs receive to the layer 7 packet processor.

Layer 7 network security for container workloads

An administrator agent and local worker agents are provided in nodes of a distributed system to support dynamic tracing of runtime data. Trace profiles are associated with the nodes on which the local worker agents reside. The local worker agents monitor the runtime data for an error, and the administrator agent adjusts the trace profile(s) in response to the error(s). The administrator agent sends the adjusted trace profile(s) to the local worker agents, so as to enable trace output data of traces performed by the nodes to be increased or decreased.

Dynamic tracing of runtime data in a distributed system

The disclosure provides an example method for live packet tracing. Some embodiments of the method include configuring a first network interface of a first pod to mark each of a plurality of packets, with a corresponding flow tag and a corresponding packet identifier, receiving, from one or more observation points, at least one of copies or metadata of the plurality of packets each marked with the corresponding flow tag and the corresponding packet identifier. In some embodiments, the method further includes displaying data indicative of the at least one of the copies or the metadata of the plurality of packets.

Live traffic tracing for pods in a network

A system and method for capturing resource usage information in a network for namespaces in which pods operate are described herein. A data structure specifies a topology that includes a gateway and routing addresses in a network whose usage is to be captured. The data structure is provided to an API of a master node controlling the pods. A controller in the master node enforces the data structure and reports results back to the API.

Use of custom resource definitions for reporting network resource usage of a node cluster

Growing community of inventors

Beijing, China

Donghai Han