Reducing fragmentation of packets in a networking environment

Abstract

Automated techniques reduce packet fragmentation in a communications network environment, including a networking environment that uses tunnels. In a tunneling environment, a tunnel endpoint evaluates whether tunnel processing for an outbound packet will cause the packet to exceed a particular size such as a message transmission unit ('MTU') size, which in turn would lead to error processing and/or fragmentation of the packet. Similar MTU and packet mismatch may occur in a system across the virtual machine and the hypervisor, a networking stack and the physical MTU possible on the network. If so, the tunnel endpoint or the network driver simulates an error condition and returns an error message to the protocol stack that prepared the packet, so that the packet size can be reduced before the packet is actually sent on the tunnel. Existing functionality is leveraged to perform the size reduction, thus obviating the need for administrator intervention.