Patent ID: 8929253
Filing Date: 2015-01-06
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A data center comprising: a plurality of servers, each server producing one or more traffic streams; a switch having a plurality of physical ports, each physical port receiving one or more of the traffic streams from the plurality of servers, the switch including memory configured to provide a plurality of virtual output queues and egress queues and a network processor in communication with the virtual output queues and egress queues, the network processor including: logic configured to logically partition each physical port into a plurality of virtual ports; logic configured to assign switching resources of the switch to each of the virtual ports; logic configured to uniquely associate one or more of the virtual output queues with each virtual port; logic configured to derive a source virtual port for each traffic stream arriving at the physical ports; logic configured to place frames belonging to each traffic stream in a given one of the one or more virtual output queues uniquely associated with the source virtual port derived from that traffic stream; logic configured to determine a destination virtual port for the frames belonging to each traffic stream; logic configured to transfer the frames belonging to each traffic stream from the virtual output queues in which those frames are placed to an egress queue uniquely associated with the destination virtual port determined for the frames belonging to that traffic stream; and logic configured to forward the frames belonging to each traffic stream from the egress queue uniquely associated with the destination virtual port determined for the frames belonging to that traffic stream to a destination physical port of the switch; and a port extender connected to the physical ports of the switch, the port extender being disposed between the plurality of servers and the switch to pass the traffic streams produced by the servers through to the switch, and wherein the network processor of the switch further comprises logic configured to assign virtual ports to remote physical ports of the port extender and to provision the virtual ports assigned to the remote physical ports with resources and features of the switch, whereby the remote physical ports of the port extender inherit the resources and features of the switch provisioned to those assigned virtual ports.