Intelligent Host Route Distribution for Low Latency Forwarding and Ubiquitous Virtual Machine Mobility in Interconnected Data Centers

A method comprising:

• at a routing bridge in a network, receiving a routing message associated with a virtual machine sent by an egress routing bridge that distributes the routing message, wherein the routing message comprises nickname attribute information associated with the egress routing bridge and mobility attribute information associated with a mobility characteristic of the virtual machine;
• determining whether the nickname attribute indicates that the egress routing bridge nickname is unique;
• keeping the next hop of the routing message to be associated with the egress routing bridge when the nickname is unique;
• and
• updating the next hop of the routing message to be associated with the routing bridge when the egress routing bridge nickname is not unique.

An apparatus comprising:

• a plurality of ports;
• a memory;
• and
• a processor coupled to the ports and the memory unit, and configured to:
• receive a routing message associated with a virtual machine from a routing bridge, wherein the routing message comprises mobility attribute information associated with a mobility characteristic of the virtual machine obtained from an egress routing bridge that distributes the routing message;
• add a forwarding table attribute to the routing message that indicates whether or not host route information associated with the virtual machine is stored in a forwarding table;
• and
• distribute the routing message that includes the mobility attribute information and the forwarding table attribute to one or more routing bridges in the network.

A computer-readable storage media encoded with software comprising computer executable instructions and when the software is executed operable to:

• receive at a first routing bridge a routing message associated with a virtual machine sent by a second routing bridge, wherein the routing message comprises mobility attribute information associated with a mobility characteristic of the virtual machine obtained from an egress routing bridge that distributes the routing message;
• add a forwarding table attribute to the routing message that indicates whether or not the first routing bridge has host route information associated with the virtual machine in a forwarding table of the first routing bridge;
• and
• distribute the routing message that includes the mobility attribute information and the forwarding table attribute to one or more routing bridges in the network.