Per-Connection Routing Table for Virtual Network Symmetry
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Solution Overview
Problem
In virtual network environments, stateful network devices face challenges in achieving symmetric routing due to the lack of support for per-connection routing from some operating systems, which impacts the performance of upstream stateful network devices.
Innovation Solution
A host network device with a hypervisor manages a per-connection routing table to store and retrieve MAC addresses and routing interfaces for TCP connections, ensuring symmetric routing by overriding routing decisions made by virtual machine operating systems that do not support per-connection routing.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If a host network device uses a virtual environment with virtual machines running operating systems that do not support per-connection routing, then virtualization performance is optimized, but symmetric routing cannot be guaranteed for stateful network devices
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a per-connection routing table as an intermediary data structure between the virtual machine operating system and the stateful network device. This table stores the MAC address and routing interface information for each TCP connection, allowing the host network device to override the OS routing decisions and ensure symmetric routing to stateful devices, while still maintaining the virtualization performance benefits.
2Device complexity
If the host network device relies on virtual machine operating system routing decisions, then device complexity is reduced, but per-connection routing capability is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements preliminary action by pre-storing the MAC address and routing interface information in the per-connection routing table before routing decisions need to be made. When a TCP connection is established, the host network device proactively captures and stores the stateful network device's MAC address and the routing interface used, so that when responses need to be routed back, the correct path is already determined and stored, enabling per-connection routing without complex real-time calculations.
Data Source
AI summary
A method, non-transitory computer readable medium, and host device that receives, at a routing interface, a request from a transmission control protocol (TCP) connection with a stateful network device. A media access control (MAC) address of the stateful network device is determined and the MAC address and the routing interface are stored as associated with information for the TCP connection in a per-connection routing table. The request is sent to one of a plurality of virtual machines, a response is received from the one of the virtual machines, and the MAC address and routing interface are retrieved from the per-connection routing table based on a comparison of information included in the response to the information for the TCP connection. The response is sent to the stateful network device using the retrieved MAC address and routing interface.