Nicira, Inc.

Vmware, Inc.

Shoby A Cherian

Raghavendra Subbarao Narahari Venkata

Tanuja Ingale

Anjaneya Prasad Gondi

Claudio Fleiner

Marc Fleischmann

Jinpyo Kim

Sanjay Vasudev Acharya

Hemanth Kalluri

Wenhua Liu

Marcus Armando Benedetto Campi

Janakiram Vantipalli

Ashish Ramakrishna Reddy

Aditya Kiran Pentyala

Vamshi Tangudu

Some embodiments provide a method of providing distributed storage services to a host computer from a network interface card (NIC) of the host computer. At the NIC, the method accesses a set of one or more external storages operating outside of the host computer through a shared port of the NIC that is not only used to access the set of external storages but also for forwarding packets not related to an external storage. In some embodiments, the method accesses the external storage set by using a network fabric storage driver that employs a network fabric storage protocol to access the external storage set. The method presents the external storage as a local storage of the host computer to a set of programs executing on the host computer. In some embodiments, the method presents the local storage by using a storage emulation layer on the NIC to create a local storage construct that presents the set of external storages as a local storage of the host computer.

Using physical and virtual functions associated with a NIC to access an external storage through network fabric driver

A method for providing multi-tenancy support for RDMA in a system that includes a plurality of physical hosts. Each each physical host hosts a set of data compute nodes (DCNs). The method, at an RDMA protocol stack of the first host, receives a packet that includes a request from a first DCN hosted on a first host for RDMA data transfer from a second DCN hosted on a second host. The method sends a set of parameters of an overlay network that are associated with the first DCN to an RDMA physical network interface controller of the first host. The set of parameters are used by the RDMA physical NIC to encapsulate the packet with an RDMA data transfer header and an overlay network header by using the set of parameters of the overlay network to transfer the encapsulated packet to the second physical host using the overlay network.

Methods and systems to achieve multi-tenancy in RDMA over converged Ethernet

Some embodiments provide a method of providing distributed storage services to a host computer from a network interface card (MC) of the host computer. At the NIC, the method accesses a set of one or more external storages operating outside of the host computer through a shared port of the NIC. In some embodiments, the method accesses the external storage set by using a network fabric storage driver that employs a network fabric storage protocol to access the external storage set. The method presents the external storage as a local storage of the host computer to a set of programs executing on the host computer. In some embodiments, the method presents the local storage by using a storage emulation layer on the NIC to create a local storage construct that presents the set of external storages as a local storage of the host computer.

Accessing an external storage through a NIC

Using a NIC as a network accelerator to allow VM access to an external storage via a PF module, bus, and VF module

Accessing multiple external storages to present an emulated local storage through a NIC

Emulating a local storage by accessing an external storage through a shared port of a NIC

A method for providing multi-tenancy support for RDMA in a system that includes a plurality of physical hosts. Each physical host hosts a set of data compute nodes (DCNs). The method, at an RDMA protocol stack of the first host, receives a packet that includes a request from a first DCN hosted on a first host for RDMA data transfer from a second DCN hosted on a second host. The method sends a set of parameters of an overlay network that are associated with the first DCN to an RDMA physical network interface controller of the first host. The set of parameters are used by the RDMA physical NIC to encapsulate the packet with an RDMA data transfer header and an overlay network header by using the set of parameters of the overlay network to transfer the encapsulated packet to the second physical host using the overlay network.

Methods and systems to achieve multi-tenancy in RDMA over converged ethernet

A method for offloading packet encapsulation for an overlay network is provided. The method, at a virtualization software of a host, sends a mapping table of the overlay network to a physical network interface controller (NIC) associated with the host. The mapping table maps the identification of each of a set of virtual machine (VM) of a tenant on the host to an identification of a tunnel on the overlay network. The method, at the virtualization software, receives a packet from a VM of the tenant. The method sends the packet to the physical NIC. The method, at the physical NIC, encapsulates the packet for transmission over the overlay network by using the mapping table. The method of claim also tags the packet by the virtualization software as a packet that requires encapsulation for transmission in the overlay network prior to sending the packet to the physical NIC.

Methods and systems to offload overlay network packet encapsulation to hardware

A method for providing support for multi-tenancy in single root input/out virtualization (SR-IOV) enabled physical network interface controller (NIC) is provided. The NIC is associated with a host. The SR-IOV provides a physical function (PF) and a set of virtual functions (VFs) for the NIC. The method at a VF of the physical NIC, receives a mapping table of an overlay network which associates an identification of each of a set of virtual machine (VM) of a tenant on the host to an identification of a tunnel end point on the overlay network. The method receives a transmit packet from a VM connected to the VF and performs a lookup in the mapping table to identify source and destination tunnel end points associated with source and destination VMs in the packet. The method encapsulates the packet, for transmission through the tunnel end point associated with the source VM.

Methods and systems for providing multi-tenancy support for Single Root I/O Virtualization

Growing community of inventors

Dublin, CA, United States of America

Shoby A Cherian