Nvidia Corporation

Hemamalini Manickavasagam

Anand Rajagopalan

Ashutosh Jha

Ayaz Abdulla

Sameer Nanda

Norman K Chen

Thomas A Maufer

Paul J Sidenblad

A method for identifying a failed network interface card in a system having two NICs configured as a team includes the steps of transmitting a first data packet from the first NIC to a third NIC, wherein the third NIC is not a member of the team, and transmitting a second data packet from the first NIC to the second NIC or from the second NIC to the third NIC, depending on whether the third NIC responds to the transmission of the first data packet. One advantage of the disclosed method is that it specifically identifies which NIC within the team has failed, which is something that cannot be determined by simply exchanging packets between the two NICs.

Technique for identifying a failed network interface card within a team of network interface cards

The invention sets forth an approach for aggregating a plurality of NICs in a computing device into a single logical NIC as seen by that computing device's operating system. The combination of the single logical NIC and a network resource manager provides a reliable and persistent interface to the operating system and to the network hardware, thereby improving the reliability and ease-of-configuration of the computing device. The invention also may improve communications security by supporting the 802.1X and the 802.1Q networking standards.

Single logical network interface for advanced load balancing and fail-over functionality

One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a method for failing back network connections to a network interface card (NIC) within a computing device. The method includes the steps of monitoring a failed or unreliable NIC within the computing device, determining that the failed or unreliable NIC has recovered, determining that a functional NIC within the computing device is overloaded, selecting a first connection set communicating through the overloaded NIC, and transferring the first connection set to the recovered NIC. With this approach, intelligent decisions can be advantageously made regarding whether to fail back a network connection set to a recovered NIC based on the traffic loads on the overloaded NIC and the recovered NIC. Such an approach to balancing network traffic across the functional NICs within a computing device may substantially improve overall performance relative to prior art techniques.

Intelligent failback in a load-balanced networking environment

A hash engine in a network device driver maintains data on the utilization and error rate for each network interface card ('NIC') within a local computing device. From this data, the hash engine intelligently selects transmit NICs and receive NICs based on various networking parameters provided from a software driver program. Transmit packets sent from the operating system in a local computing device to a remote computing device are intercepted, modified and redirected to transmit NICs selected by the hash engine for transmission to remote computing devices. Similarly, address resolution protocol ('ARP') response packets sent by the operating system in response to ARP request packets are intercepted, modified and redirected to receive NICs selected by the hash engine for transmission. By selecting receive NICs and transmit NICs in this fashion, the hash engine is able to intelligently load balance transmit and receive traffic in the local computing device, thereby improving overall network performance relative to prior art techniques.

Intelligent load balancing and failover of network traffic

A method of avoiding cache corruption when establishing a network connection includes the steps of transmitting a request to a computing device, where the request includes a masquerade layer-3 address, and receiving a reply transmitted by the computing device in response to the request, where the reply includes a MAC address associated with the computing device. Since the masquerade layer-3 address is unique relative to the computer network, computing devices within the network do no overwrite existing layer-3-to-MAC relationships in their respective caches with the layer-3-to-MAC relationship reflected in the request. Thus, the method enables a network connection to be initiated between two computing devices in the same computer network while avoiding neighbor cache pollution on other computing devices in that network.

System and method for avoiding neighbor cache pollution

A hash table in the network device driver maintains data on the traffic characteristics for each network interface ('NIC') within a computing device. If one of the NICs in the computing device becomes unreliable, the cost function in the hash engine allows the software driver to initiate network traffic redistribution among the remaining reliable NICs in the computing device. Using this hash engine, the software driver is able to intelligently redirect each of the network connections on an unreliable NIC to a reliable NIC within the computing device, in a way that optimizes the distribution of network traffic across the remaining reliable NICs. Alternatively, if a connection is moved from an old NIC to a new NIC, the software driver can detect the moved connection and offload the moved connection to a hardware offload engine on the new NIC. With this approach, issues such as network interface overloading and computing device performance degradation may be more easily avoided when failing over network connections, thereby improving overall system performance relative to prior art techniques.

Intelligent failover in a load-balanced networking environment

Intelligent failover in a load-balanced network environment

One embodiment of the present invention is a method for identifying a faulty NIC in a team of NICs using a minimum number of packets transmitted in a round-robin scheme. Relative to prior art schemes, the disclosed method advantageously reduces the number of keep-alive packets necessary to monitor the NICs within a team and, to the extent there is a failure, enables the faulty NIC to be identified.

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Hemamalini Manickavasagam