Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Milan Dasgupta

Harish Kumar Chandrappa

Daniel Max Firestone

Deepak Bansal

Rishabh Tewari

Xinyan Zan

Adarsh Kirnelli Rangaiah

Michal Czeslaw Zygmunt

Young Lee

Eric Lawrence Albert Lantz

Harish Srinivasan

Nisheeth Srivastava

Neeraj Motwani

Vaibhav Kumar

David Michael Brumley

Vishal Taneja

Anavi Arun Nahar

Narayan Annamalai

Denys Gurzhii

Tian Tan

Vladimir Serov

A method is presented for processing directional data packet traffic. A main data packet, characterized by a plurality of main data packet characteristics including at least a first IP address representing a first source, and a second IP address representing a first destination, is received at a rule processing engine. Based on the main data packet characteristics, a set of rules for processing the main data packet is retrieved. A main direction unified flow for the main data packet, and a speculative reverse direction unified flow for a reverse direction data packet are generated based on the main data packet characteristics and the retrieved set of rules. The main data packet is processed based on the main direction unified flow. Responsive to receiving the reverse direction data packet, the reverse direction data packet is processed based on the speculative reverse direction unified flow.

Data packet traffic using speculative unified flow

Described herein are systems and methods for supporting multicast for virtual networks. In some embodiments, a native multicast approach can utilized in which packet replication is performed on a host node of a virtual machine (VM) with a multicast data packet encapsulated in uniquely address unicast packets. In some embodiments, a network virtual appliance can be utilized. A multicast packet sent from the VM can be unicasted to the network virtual appliance. The multicast appliance can then replicate the packet into multiple copies and send the packets to the receivers in the virtual network as unicast data packets encapsulating the multicast packet.

Multi-cast support for a virtual network

Described herein is a system and method for flow state save/restore of a virtual filtering platform. A first instance of a driver manages policy and flow state for ongoing flows between client device(s) and virtual machine(s). The virtual filtering platform is transitioned from the first instance of a driver to a second instance of the driver by serializing the policy and state for the ongoing flows on the first instance of the driver using a one pass algorithm. The serialized policy and state for the ongoing flows can be de-serialized with the ongoing flows re-established and/or reconciled on the second instance of the driver in accordance with the de-serialized policy and state for the plurality of ongoing flows. In some embodiments, a memory management technique can use a single operating system memory allocation call to allocate memory for the transition, with the technique managing utilization of the allocation memory.

Network policy and flow state save/restore for highly available servicing

Described herein is a system and method for managing network flow state for ongoing flows (connectionless protocol flows and connection-based protocol flows) between client device(s) and a virtual machine using a flow collection data structure (e.g. hash table) having a predefined maximum quantity of ongoing flows that can be managed. When it is determined that the flow collection data structure is managing greater than an acceptable threshold of connectionless protocol flows, at a dynamically adjustable frequency, flow state for more connectionless protocol flow(s) having an unexpired time-to-live are expired. The frequency can be adjusted based upon a rate at which new flows are being created and/or a rate at which flows are being deleted. Also described herein is a system and method in which, at a particular frequency, only a portion of the flows in the flow collection data structure are evaluated in order to minimize impact on packet processing.

Network flow state management for connectionless protocol(s)

Virtual networks located in different regions of cloud provider are peered using unique regional identifiers for the virtual networks. The regional identifiers and other information are pushed down a network management stack to implement the peering.

Cross-regional virtual network peering

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Milan Dasgupta