Presenting realized state of multi-site logical network

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-11115301-B1
Application number	US-202016906942-A
Country	US
Kind code	B1
Filing date	Jun 19, 2020
Priority date	Apr 6, 2020
Publication date	Sep 7, 2021
Grant date	Sep 7, 2021

Abstract

Some embodiments provide a method for collecting data regarding realized state associated with a logical network spanning multiple physical sites. At a global manager that manages a logical network, the method receives a request to collect realized state for a set of one or more logical network elements, each of which spans a set of two or more physical sites. Each physical site is managed by a local manager. For each of the logical network elements, the method identifies the set of physical sites spanned by the logical network element. For each of the logical network elements, the method sends requests for realized state of the logical network element to the local manager of each identified physical site spanned by the logical network element. The method generates a report for presentation from the realized states received from the local managers.

First claim

We claim:

1. A method for collecting data regarding realized state associated with a logical network spanning a plurality of physical sites, the method comprising:
at a global manager that manages the logical network:
receiving a request to collect realized state for a set of one or more logical network elements, each of which spans a set of two or more physical sites of the plurality of physical sites spanned by the logical network, each physical site managed by a local manager;
for each logical network element of the set of one or more logical network elements, identifying the set of two or more physical sites spanned by the logical network elements;
for each logical network element of the set of one or more logical network elements, sending requests fora realized state of the logical network element to each local manager of each identified physical site spanned by the logical network element; and
providing a report for display, the report comprising the realized states received from the local managers of the identified sets of two or more physical sites spanned by the set of one or more logical network elements.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the realized state of a particular logical network element indicates whether a desired configuration of the particular logical network element is realized at each of the two or more physical sites spanned by the particular logical network element.

3. The method of claim 2 , wherein the realized state of the particular logical network element further indicates how the particular logical network element is implemented at each of the two or more physical sites spanned by the particular logical network element.

4. The method of claim 3 , wherein the realized state of the particular logical network element comprises data from one or more physical forwarding elements (PFEs) executing on a particular set of host machines at the two or more physical sites spanned by the particular logical network element, wherein the particular set of host machines implement the particular logical network element in order to forward data packets for the logical network.

5. The method of claim 2 , wherein identifying the set of two or more physical sites spanned by a particular logical network element comprises a calculation of a span attribute of the particular logical network element.

6. The method of claim 5 , wherein the calculation of the span attribute for the particular logical network element is based on a set of relationships of the particular logical network element with a set of other logical network elements.

7. The method of claim 5 , wherein the calculation of the span attribute for a particular logical network element comprises inheriting the span attribute from another logical network element.

8. The method of claim 2 , wherein identifying the set of two or more physical sites spanned by a particular logical network element comprises determining the spanned physical sites based on a definition of the particular logical network element at the global manager by an administrator of the logical network.

9. The method of claim 2 , further comprising providing to each local manager a desired state for configuring each logical network elements of the set of one or more logical network elements whose span includes the local manager's respective physical site.

10. The method of claim 9 , wherein the realized state for a particular logical network element describes a deviation from the desired state in implementing the particular logical network element at one or more of the two or more physical sites spanned by the particular logical network element.

11. The method of claim 9 , wherein the desired state provided to each local manager is a site-specific subset of a global desired state defined at the global manager by an administrator of the logical network.

12. The method of claim 11 , wherein the site-specific subset of the global desired state provided to each local manager is generated by parsing the global desired state and extracting portions that are associated with the local manager's respective physical site.

13. The method of claim 12 , wherein the global desired state is represented as a policy tree comprising (i) a set of nodes, each node corresponding to a particular logical network element in the set of one or more logical network elements and (ii) a set of edges, each edge representing a relationships between a pair of nodes in the set of nodes, wherein the site-specific subset of the global desired state provided to each local manager is a subtree of the policy tree comprising a subset of nodes corresponding to a subset of logical network elements whose span includes the local manager's respective physical site.

14. A non-transitory machine-readable medium storing a global manager program which when executed by at least one processing unit collects data regarding realized state associated with a logical network spanning a plurality of physical sites, the global manager program comprising sets of instructions for:
receiving a request to collect realized state for a set of one or more logical network elements, each of which spans a set of two or more physical sites of the plurality of physical sites spanned by the logical network, each physical site managed by a local manager;
for each logical network element of the set of one or more logical network elements, identifying the set of two or more physical sites spanned by the logical network element;
for each logical network element of the set of one or more logical network elements, sending requests fora realized state of the logical network element to each local manager of each physical site of the identified set of two or more physical sites spanned by the logical network element; and
providing a report for display, the report comprising the realized states received from the local managers of the identified sets of two or more physical sites spanned by the set of one or more logical network elements.

15. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 14 , wherein the global manager program further comprises sets of instructions for:
receiving a set of notifications from the local manager; and
providing the received set of notifications to an administrator of the logical network,
wherein the set of notifications are received automatically and not in response to any request originating from the global manager program.

16. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 15 , wherein the set of notifications comprises an alarm from a particular local manager about a problem with an implementation of a particular logical network element at one or more of the two or more physical sites spanned by the particular logical network element.

17. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 16 , wherein the problem with the implementation of the particular logical network element comprises an IP address conflict of the particular logical network element with another logical network element at one of the two or more physical sites spanned by the particular logical network element.

18. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 15 , wherein the set of notifications comprises a message from a particular local manager at a particular physical site indicating that the particular local manager has overridden a configuration of a particular logical network element implemented at the particular physical site.

19. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 18 , wherein the overridden configuration comprises a change to forwarding rules

Assignees

• Vmware Inc

Inventors

• Margarian Pavlush
• Palavalli Amarnath
• Dorr Josh
• Muppala Suresh

Classifications

• H04L41/12

  Discovery or management of network topologies · CPC title

• H04L41/0893

  Assignment of logical groups to network elements · CPC title

• H04L41/122

  of virtualised topologies, e.g. software-defined networks [SDN] or network function virtualisation [NFV] · CPC title

• H04L41/0894

  Policy-based network configuration management · CPC title

• H04L41/0895

  Configuration of virtualised networks or elements, e.g. virtualised network function or OpenFlow elements · CPC title