Abstract: A stacked chassis comprising multiple physical switch/router chassis operates without any special stacking hardware or stacking channels. Instead, a stacking LAG is installed between front-end switch ports on the stacked chassis. The chassis controllers negotiate a master, which controls operation of all chassis in the stack. A stacked-chassis-wide port numbering scheme is used to distribute information to all line cards in the system. Each line card processes the information to distill physical-chassis significant information for operation of that chassis in the stack.

Abstract: An information handling system is provided. The information handling system includes systems and methods for providing an anycast MAC addressing of a virtual redundancy router protocol instance that spans a plurality of aggregation switches. The anycast MAC address may be provided by a virtual bridging device and then used as an address of a virtual IP instance accessible through the virtual bridging device. Using the anycast MAC address with the virtual IP instance, a packet to be routed from one rack to another rack in a data center may be dynamically routed based a current load distribution.

Abstract: An information handling system is provided. The information handling system includes systems and methods for providing an anycast MAC addressing capability to a network. The anycast MAC address may be provided by creating and using virtual routing bridges, which in the network topology appear in front of service-providing nodes associated with the anycast MAC address. The physical routing bridges that neighbor the virtual routing bridge in the network are configured so as to provide the routing bridge functions to the virtual routing bridge, including propagating network topology information representing the virtual routing bridge to the rest of the network.

Abstract: A network switch is comprised of a control processor and one or more line cards. The control processor includes functionality to register interest with a hypervisor, operating in conjunction with a network host connected to the switch, in data object attributes maintained on the network host by the hypervisor. The hypervisor associated with the network host sends changes in the host attributes to the switch which the switch maintains in a listing of attributes. The switch traps and copies particular packets to the switch control processor where a provisioning function operates on the attribute information in the list with source information included in the packet header in order to configure a forwarding table on the line card.

Abstract: A provided information handling system includes a plurality of aggregation devices configured to distribute information in a virtual link trunk and a plurality of nodes coupled to the aggregation devices. When an aggregation device receives a reboot command, that aggregation device is configured to transmit a first message to the nodes indicating that the aggregation device is rebooting, and receive a first acknowledgement message from the nodes indicating that they will not send any information to the rebooting aggregation device. The aggregation device is then configured to reboot, receive a second message from the nodes indicating the nodes are ready to receive information from the rebooted aggregation device, transmit a second acknowledgement message to the nodes indicating that the rebooted aggregation device has rebooted and is capable of receiving information, and receive information from one of the nodes for transmission to another node.

Abstract: A network switch is comprised of a control processor and one or more line cards. The control processor includes functionality to register interest with a hypervisor, operating in conjunction with a network host connected to the switch, in data object attributes maintained on the network host by the hypervisor. The hypervisor associated with the network host sends changes in the host attributes to the switch which the switch maintains in a listing of attributes. The switch traps and copies particular packets to the switch control processor where a provisioning function operates on the attribute information in the list with source information included in the packet header in order to configure a forwarding table on the line card.

Abstract: An information handling system is provided. The information handling system includes systems and methods for implementing a multi-chassis link aggregation group (MLAG) in a network. This may be achieved by connecting at least two switches to a plurality of servers, with at least one logical bridging device and at least one MLAG configured in between the network and the plurality of servers. The at least one logical bridging device may be associated with the at least one MLAG. The system may include at least one MLAG per logical bridging device, but may include more MLAGs than logical bridging devices.

Abstract: A network switch is comprised of a control processor and one or more line cards. The control processor includes functionality to register interest with a hypervisor, operating in conjunction with a network host connected to the switch, in data object attributes maintained on the network host by the hypervisor. The hypervisor associated with the network host sends changes in the host attributes to the switch which the switch maintains in a listing of attributes. The switch traps and copies particular packets to the switch control processor where a provisioning function operates on the attribute information in the list with source information included in the packet header in order to configure a forwarding table on the line card.