Vmware, Inc.

Nicira, Inc.

Srikanth V Garimella

Mukesh Hira

Ankur Kumar Sharma

Jagdish S Patel

An approach for securing a DHCP server against unauthorized client attacks in a SDN environment is presented. In an embodiment, a method comprises: determining a count of sub-interfaces implemented on an interface card of a virtual machine; setting a count of unique client identifiers for the virtual machine to zero; determining whether a dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) request has been received from the virtual machine; in response to determining that a DHCP request has been received from the virtual machine, incrementing the count of unique client identifiers; determining whether the count of unique client identifiers exceeds the count of sub-interfaces implemented on the interface card of the virtual machine; and in response to determining that the count of unique client identifiers does not exceed the count of sub-interfaces implemented on the interface card of the virtual machine, forwarding the DHCP request to an uplink port.

Method for securing a DHCP server from unauthorized client attacks in a software defined network

The disclosure provides an approach for load balancing packets within a data center. The approach leverages dynamically collected and up-to-date health information on each virtual computing instance located within the data center. In one embodiment, health monitoring modules, located within hypervisors of each host computer, collect health statistics on local virtual computing instances. Each health monitoring module shares its locally collected health statistics with every other health monitoring module. Each health monitoring module provides the shared health statistics, on all virtual computing instances within the data center, to a local load balancing module located within the hypervisor of each host computer. Each load balancing module uses health statistics of all virtual computing instances to load balance packets within the data center. Further, the disclosure describes an affinity-based load balancing approach in which a local load balancing module may give preference to local virtual computing instances when making load balancing decisions.

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Srikanth V Garimella