Embodiments of the present invention relate to flow control within a high-performance, scalable, and call-drop-free
data center switching fabric. Describe a high-performance, scalable, and call-drop-free
data center switching fabric and infrastructure.
Data center switching fabrics can utilize low-cost, off-the-shelf packet-based switching components such as IP over
Ethernet (
IPoE) and
overlay forwarding technologies rather than proprietary switching fabrics. In one example, a
host network accelerator (HNA) is positioned between servers (eg, virtual machines or dedicated servers) in a
data center and an
IPoE core network that provides point-to-point
connectivity between the servers. The HNA is a hardware device that embeds a
virtual router on one or more integrated circuits, where the
virtual router is configured to extend one or more virtual networks to virtual machines and use an
overlay network to seamlessly transfer packets through a switch fabric. In other words, the HNA provides a seamless hardware-based interface to the
overlay technology used to communicate packet flows through the data center's core switching network.