Cisco Technology, Inc.

Nikhil Dhar

Samar Sharma

Mouli Vytla

Avni Baveja

Biju Mathews Mammen

Mitali Parthasarathy

Ashish Purushottam Attarde

In an example, there is disclosed a network apparatus for providing native load balancing within a switch or router, including a first network interface operable to communicatively couple to a first network; a plurality of second network interfaces operable to communicatively couple to a second network; one or more logic elements comprising a switching engine operable for providing network switching or routing; and one or more logic elements forming a load balancing engine operable for receiving incoming network traffic via the first network, the incoming traffic having a destination internet protocol address (IP) corresponding to a virtual IP (VIP) designated for load balancing; assigning the incoming traffic to a traffic bucket associated with the second network; and logging the assigning; wherein the switching engine and load balancing engine are configured to be provided on the same hardware as each other and as the first network interface and plurality of second network interface.

Statistical collection in a network switch natively configured as a load balancer

A method is provided in one example embodiment and includes transmitting from an appliance connected to a first virtual device context ('VDC') instantiated on a network device a request for statistics associated with selected ones of a plurality of VDCs implemented on the network device, wherein the plurality of VDCs includes the first VDC and wherein the appliance is connected to the first VDC via a management link; and receiving at the appliance the requested statistics associated with the plurality of VDCs. The method may further comprise receiving at the appliance a configuration message, wherein the configuration message identifies at least one of the selected ones of the plurality of VDCs for which statistics are to be provided, at least one type of statistic to be provided for the selected ones of the VDCs, and a polling interval at which statistics are to be collected from the selected VDCs.

Mechanism for serving hardware resource information to an attached appliance

In accordance with one example embodiment, there is provided a method for configuring a virtual IP address ('VIP') at a network element, wherein the configuring includes identifying at least one ingress interface of the network element for receiving traffic destined for the VIP and wherein the VIP is associated with a plurality of servers; determining whether the configuring indicates that the VIP is to be advertised; and advertising the configured VIP address to at least one neighboring network node if the configuring indicates that the VIP is to be advertised.

Route advertisement for native hardware-based virtual IP address ('VIP') on layer 2/layer 3 switch

In one embodiment, an indication of a plurality of network nodes and load balancing criteria is received. A plurality of forwarding entries are created, wherein a forwarding entry of the plurality of forwarding entries is based upon the load balancing criteria and corresponds to a network node of the plurality of network nodes. A network element applies the plurality of forwarding entries to data packets to load balance the data packets among the plurality of network nodes. A plurality of counts are tracked, wherein each count corresponds to at least one forwarding entry of the plurality of forwarding entries and represents the number of times the corresponding at least one forwarding entry is used to redirect a data packet.

Statistical operations associated with network traffic forwarding

In one embodiment, a method for enabling network appliance monitoring is disclosed. The method includes establishing a remote execution channel for executing commands on a network element such as e.g. a switch. The method also includes using the remote execution channel to initiate execution of one or more commands on the network element. The method further includes receiving at least part of an output resulting from the execution of the one or more commands, wherein the received at least part of the output enables performing the network appliance monitoring.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Nikhil Dhar