US 11,893,404 B2
Efficient traffic forwarding between virtual machines
Ankur Kumar Sharma, Mountain View, CA (US)
Assigned to Nutanix, Inc., San Jose, CA (US)
Filed by Nutanix, Inc., San Jose, CA (US)
Filed on Oct. 23, 2019, as Appl. No. 16/661,546.
Claims priority of provisional application 62/883,549, filed on Aug. 6, 2019.
Prior Publication US 2021/0042142 A1, Feb. 11, 2021
Int. Cl. G06F 9/455 (2018.01); H04L 12/46 (2006.01); H04L 45/586 (2022.01); H04L 45/00 (2022.01)
CPC G06F 9/45558 (2013.01) [H04L 12/4641 (2013.01); H04L 45/586 (2013.01); H04L 45/66 (2013.01); G06F 2009/45595 (2013.01)] 20 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A method, comprising:
obtaining, by a hypervisor, a layer-2 packet from a first virtual machine (VM) running on the hypervisor;
determining, by the hypervisor, that a destination media access control (MAC) address in a first layer-2 header of the layer-2 packet is allocated to a second VM running on a remote hypervisor;
decapsulating, by the hypervisor, the first layer-2 header to obtain an inner layer-3 packet;
obtaining, by the hypervisor, a virtual local area network (VLAN) identifier of a transit VLAN (TVLAN) from a mapping between the VLAN identifier and a distributed virtual routing (DVR) identifier of a DVR instance operating on the hypervisor and the remote hypervisor, wherein the TVLAN is dedicated for inter-VM traffic of a plurality of VLANs associated with the DVR instance, and wherein a respective DVR instance facilitates a routing for a corresponding tenant;
encapsulating, by the hypervisor, the inner layer-3 packet with a second layer-2 header comprising the VLAN identifier of the TVLAN to generate an updated layer-2 packet;
setting a first MAC address of the hypervisor as a source MAC address and a second MAC address of the remote hypervisor as a destination MAC address in the second layer-2 header; and
determining an egress port corresponding to the remote hypervisor for the updated layer-2 packet based on the second MAC address in the second layer-2 header.