Patent ID: 8799444

Claim:
A method of host discovery and path tracing, the method comprising: determining, by hardware, a closest neighbor switch in a network to a network management server among a plurality of switches in the network, wherein the determining of the closest neighbor switch includes: determining a MAC address of the network management server; looking up the MAC address of the network management server in an address table stored in a neighbor switch to identify a port of the neighbor switch associated with the MAC address; looking up, in a neighbor table stored in the neighbor switch, the port identified from the address table lookup to determine whether any neighbor device is associated with the port in the neighbor table; and in response to determining that no neighbor device is associated with the port from the lookup in the neighbor table, determining that the neighbor switch is the closest neighbor switch to the network management server among the plurality of switches in the network; discovering a location in the network of a source host based on the determining of the closest neighbor switch to the network management server; discovering a location in the network of a destination host based on the determining of the closest neighbor switch to the network management server; and discovering a path from the source host to the destination host based on the discovered locations.