Nicira, Inc.

Vmware, Inc.

Palo Alto Networks, Inc.

Wmware, Inc.

Niciria, Inc.

Jayant Jain

Anirban Sengupta

Raju Koganty

Pierluigi Rolando

Kantesh Mundaragi

Xinhua Hong

Mohan Parthasarathy

Rahul Mishra

Rick Lund

Akhila Naveen

Alok S Tiagi

Subrahmanyam Manuguri

Srinivas Nimmagadda

Mike Parsa

Mani Kancherla

Sami Boutros

Fenil Kavathia

Yong Feng

Serge Maskalik

Rajeev Nair

Kausum Kumar

Ganesan Chandrashekhar

Yong Wang

Uday Suresh Masurekar

Allwyn M Sequeira

Ly Loi

Yuxiao Zhang

Sushruth Gopal

Camille Lecuyer

Saahil Gokhale

Mukesh Hira

Anuprem Chalvadi

Jingmin Zhou

Yang Ping

Weiqing Wu

Arnold Poon

Kai-Wei Fan

Minjal Agarwal

Russell Lu

Pankaj Thakkar

Ronghua Zhang

Alexander Tessmer

Abhishek Goliya

Rahul Jain

Shadab Shah

Stephen Tan

Sachin Mohan Vaidya

Brian Russell Kean

Mingfei Peng

Brenden Blanco

Chidambareswaran Raman

W Andrew Lambeth

Jia Yu

Debashis Basak

Anand Girish Parthasarathy

Dexiang Wang

Aravind Srinivasan

Laxmikant Vithal Gunda

Amit Chopra

Sirisha Myneni

Todd Sabin

Ganesh Sadasivan

Li Sun

Gurudutt Maiya Belur

Haihua Luo

Mohit Sahni

Baibhav Singh

Sandesh Sawant

Yanjun Lin

Aditya Srinivasa Ivaturi

Chandran Anjur Narasimhan

Vikas Kamath

Nishant Jain

Vinayak Shashikant Naik

Vivek Agarwal

Craig Farley Newell

Kaushal Bansal

Boon Seong Ang

Adam Stephen Rykowski

Ankur Dubey

Mayank Agarwal

Wenyi Jiang

Guolin Yang

Rishi Mehta

Aditi Vutukuri

Sushil Kumar Singh

Sunitha Krishna

Abhishek Mishra

Ravishankar Chamarajnagar

Sagar Date

Sulay Shah

Jeremy Olmsted-Thompson

Leung Tao Kwok

Vedant Saran

Jerry Pereira

Sumedh Saurav

Sridhar Kommireddy

Lakshman Krishnamoorthy

A network controller communicates a wildcard domain name defined by a tenant and IP addresses of data centers for which a tenant has configured that wildcard to network elements of a network fabric through which the data centers are accessible. Each network element creates a rule to forward DNS requests with FQDNs that match the wildcard to each data center IP address. When a network element receives a DNS request indicating a FQDN that matches the wildcard, the network element forwards the DNS request to each data center IP address. Each data center element associated with one of the IP addresses receives the DNS request and determines if the FQDN can be resolved to an IP address in that data center. Data center elements for which domain name resolution is successful notify the network controller, which onboards the resource corresponding to the FQDN in that data center.

Multiple data center compatible deployment of applications matching a wildcard domain name

Some embodiments provide a method for forwarding data messages at multiple edge gateways of a logical network that process data messages between the logical network and an external network. At a first edge gateway, the method receives a data message, having an external address as a destination address, from the logical network. Based on the destination address, the method applies a default route to the data message that routes the data message to a second edge gateway and specifies a first output interface of the first edge gateway for the data message. After routing the data message, the method applies a stored NAT entry that (i) modifies a source address of the data message to be a public NAT address associated with the first edge gateway and (ii) redirects the modified data message to a second output interface of the first edge gateway instead of the first output interface.

Network address translation in active-active edge cluster

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

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

A software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) environment that leverages network virtualization management deployment is provided. Edge security services managed by the network virtualization management deployment are made available in the SD-WAN environment. Cloud gateways forward SD-WAN traffic to managed service nodes to apply security services. Network traffic is encapsulated with corresponding metadata to ensure that services can be performed according to the desired policy. Point-to-point tunnels are established between cloud gateways and the managed service nodes to transport the metadata to the managed service nodes using an overlay logical network. Virtual network identifiers (VNIs) in the metadata are used by the managed service nodes to identify tenants/policies. A managed service node receiving a packet uses provider service routers (T0-SR) and tenant service routers (T1-SRs) based on the VNI to apply the prescribed services for the tenant, and the resulting traffic is returned to the cloud gateway that originated the traffic.

Network management services in a virtual network

Some embodiments provide novel methods for performing services for machines operating in one or more datacenters. For instance, for a group of related guest machines (e.g., a group of tenant machines), some embodiments define two different forwarding planes: (I) a guest forwarding plane and (2) a service forwarding plane. The guest forwarding plane connects to the machines in the group and performs L2 and/or L3 forwarding for these machines. The service forwarding plane (1) connects to the service nodes that perform services on data messages sent to and from these machines, and (2) forwards these data messages to the service nodes. In some embodiments, the guest machines do not connect directly with the service forwarding plane.

Providing services with guest VM mobility

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 provide a method for configuring a gateway machine in a datacenter. The method receives a definition of a logical network for implementation in the datacenter. The logical network includes at least one logical switch to which logical network endpoints attach and a logical router for handling data traffic between the logical network endpoints in the datacenter and an external network. The method receives configuration data attaching a third-party service to at least one interface of the logical router via an additional logical switch designated for service attachments. The third-party service is for performing non-forwarding processing on the data traffic between the logical network endpoints and the external network. The method configures the gateway machine in the datacenter to implement the logical router and redirect at least a subset of the data traffic between the logical network endpoints and the external network to the attached third-party service.

Service insertion at logical network gateway

Example methods and systems are provided a network device to perform tunnel-based service insertion in a public cloud environment. An example method may comprise establishing a tunnel between the network device and a service path. The method may also comprise: in response to receiving a first encapsulated packet, identifying the service path specified by a service insertion rule; generating and sending a second encapsulated packet over the tunnel to cause the service path to process an inner packet according to one or more services. The method may further comprise: in response to receiving, from the service path via the tunnel, a third encapsulated packet that includes the inner packet processed by the service path, sending the inner packet processed by the service path, or a fourth encapsulated packet, towards a destination address of the inner packet.

Tunnel-based service insertion in public cloud environments

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 controller can securely publish an application of a tenant by securely extending a network fabric into the networks of the tenant with virtual private networks and NAT. After a tenant deploys an application into one or more networks of the tenant, the tenant can indicate select applications to publish. The network controller assigns a network address from the routable address space of the network fabric to the application and a network address aggregate to each application connector that will front an instance of the application, which securely extends the network fabric into the tenant network. The network controller configures NAT rules in the network fabric and on the application connector to create a route for traffic of the application through the network fabric to the application instance using a fully qualified domain name assigned to the application without exposing a private network address of the application instance and preserving security of other resource on the tenant network.

Securely publishing applications from private networks

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

Growing community of inventors

Cupertino, CA, United States of America

Jayant Jain