Patent ID: 9716631
Date: 2017-07-25
CPC Classifications: G06F,H04L

Claim:
1. A method for use with a topology agent running on a hypervisor and a plurality of switches connected in data communication through an ethernet, with each switch including a plurality of ports, and with each switch having a respectively corresponding bridge MAC (media access control) address, the method comprising: for each given switch of the plurality of switches, storing a forwarding database (FDB) in a memory of the given switch; for each switch of the plurality of switches, maintaining the FDB for the given switch by capturing which MAC addresses have been learnt on each port of the given switch and can be reached through each port of the given switch; preparing, by the topology agent running on the hypervisor, a first ethernet frame including a source MAC address having a value corresponding to a MAC address of the topology agent and a destination address of ethernet frame being a first MAC bridge address corresponding to a first switch of the plurality of switches; sending, by the topology agent and over the ethernet, the first ethernet frame; and for each given switch of the plurality of switches, checking the FDB stored in the given switch to determine whether the MAC address of the topology agent has been learnt on any of the ports of the given switch.