Patent ID: 8918631

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving at a first network management module a first identifier and a private key after a network device has been included in a data center switch fabric control plane, the first identifier being associated with the network device, the first identifier being unique within a segment of the data center switch fabric control plane, the segment being a first virtual network segment from a plurality of virtual network segments of the data center switch fabric control plane; authenticating, at the first network management module, the network device based on the private key; sending, from the first network management module, after the authenticating, a second identifier to the network device, the second identifier being unique within the segment of the data center switch fabric control plane; sending, from the first network management module, a control signal to the network device based on the second identifier; and dynamically associating one or more virtual network segments from the plurality of virtual network segments with the network device based on an operational condition of a data center switch fabric data plane, the one or more virtual network segments from the plurality of virtual network segments being different from the segment of the data center switch fabric control plane, wherein the operational condition of the data center switch fabric data plane is at least one of: a processing load of at least a second network management module, a computational load of at least a second network management module, control traffic, a processing load of the network device, a computational load of the network device, or data traffic.