Cisco Technology, Inc.

Peter Weinberger

Michael E Lipman

Hendrikus G P Bosch

Louis Gwyn Samuel

Alessandro Duminuco

Akash Renukadas Deshpande

Praveen Bhagwatula

Maciej Konstantynowicz

Andrew James McLachlan

Giles Dy Heron

Presented herein are techniques to reduce the number of redirected subscriber packet flows while performing sticky hierarchical load balancing. An Nth head end network element may be activated such that a plurality of N head end network elements are active and capable of receiving and processing one or more packet flows. A primary load balancer may then be directed to overwrite a portion of pointers of a hash table in an evenly distributed manner with pointers to the Nth head end network element such that packet flows are forwarded to the Nth head end network element, wherein the hash table retains a static number of entries as the number of head end network elements is modified.

Method for providing sticky load balancing

In one embodiment, a physical device (e.g., packet switching device, computer, server) is booted using custom-created frozen partially-booted virtual machines, avoiding the time required for an end-to-end boot process. In one embodiment while the system is operating under a current version, a partially-booted virtual image of a new operating version for each of multiple processing elements of the device is produced according to static configuration information specific to the device, with each of these partially-booted virtual machines frozen. The device is rebooted to a fully operational device by unfreezing these partially-booted virtual machines, thus removing this portion of a boot process from the real-time booting of the device. The generation of the frozen partially-booted virtual machines is advantageously performed by the device itself based on current static configuration information and the availability of the specific hardware configuration of the device.

Booting a physical device using custom-created frozen partially-booted virtual machines

An example method for topology aware provisioning in a software-defined network environment is provided and includes receiving, at a provider edge device (PE), access network topology information associated with a customer edge device in a network environment, synthesizing the access network topology information and a local router information associated with the PE into a topology message, and publishing the topology message to a central controller in the network environment. The synthesizing can include aggregating the access network topology information and the local router information, modeling the aggregated information in a representation-independent format and encoding the representation-independent formatted aggregated information in standardized machine-parsable format.

Topology aware provisioning in a software-defined networking environment

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Wallisellen, Switzerland

Peter Weinberger