US 2022/0021645 A1Published application

Facilitating distributed snat service

AssigneeVMware, Inc.

InventorsSami Boutros, Mani Kancherla, Jayant Jain, Anirban Sengupta

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Abstract

Some embodiments of the invention provide novel methods for facilitating a distributed SNAT (dSNAT) middlebox service operation for a first network at a host computer in the first network on which the dSNAT middlebox service operation is performed and a gateway device between the first network and a second network. The novel methods enable dSNAT that provides stateful SNAT at multiple host computers, thus avoiding the bottleneck problem associated with providing stateful SNAT at gateways and also significantly reduces the need to redirect packets received at the wrong host by using a capacity of off-the-shelf gateway devices to perform IPv6 encapsulation for IPv4 packets and assigning locally unique IPv6 addresses to each host executing a dSNAT middlebox service instance that are used by the gateway device.

Claims20

Dependent claims

A method of facilitating, at a gateway device of a datacenter, a source network address translation (SNAT) middlebox service operation for a first network of the datacenter, the method comprising:

at the gateway device of the datacenter:
receiving, from a second network, a packet comprising an internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) header with a first destination IPv4 address and a first destination port;
identifying an SNAT record that maps the first destination IPv4 address and port to a second destination IP address and a second destination port for inclusion in an IP version 6 (IPv6) header;
encapsulating the received packet with the IPv6 header that uses the second destination IPv6 address and port;
and
forwarding the encapsulated packet along the first network of the datacenter to a host computer operating in the datacenter and executing an SNAT middlebox service instance within the first network (i) to receive the packet, (ii) extract the IPv6 header, (iii) have the SNAT middlebox service replace the first destination IP address and port in the IPv4 address with a third destination IP address and a third destination port, and (iv) provide so that the packet to a destination machine executing on the host computer and connected to the first network.

3 more elements

A method of facilitating the provision of a distributed source network address translation (dSNAT) middlebox service at a host computer for a first network of a datacenter, the dSNAT middlebox service implemented by a plurality of dSNAT middlebox service instances executing on a plurality of host computers of the datacenter, each dSNAT using a same external IPv4 address as a source address for serviced packets the method comprising:

receiving, from a gateway device of the datacenter executing between the first network and a second network, a packet comprising an inner IPv4 packet and an internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) encapsulation header with a first destination IP address and a first destination port number;
removing the IPv6 encapsulation header to identify a dSNAT middlebox service instance executing on the host computer that is associated with a second destination IP address and a second destination port number in an IPv4 header of the inner IPv4 packet;
and
forwarding the inner IPv4 packet along the first network of the datacenter to the identified dSNAT middlebox service within the first network to receive the packet with the IPv4 header and replace the second destination IP address and second port number with a third destination IP address and port number so that the packet can then be supplied to a destination machine executing on the host computer and connected to the first network.

1 more element

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Facts

Application: 16/931,196Filed 16 Jul 2020
Published: 20 Jan 2022
Term ends: Not estimatedThe source records don’t support an estimate.

Classification8 codes

H04L 61/256
Translation of Internet protocol [IP] addresses: nAT traversal
H04L 12/66
Data switching networks: arrangements for connecting between networks having differing types of switching systems, e.g. gateways
H04L 45/745
Address processing for routing: address table lookup; Address filtering
H04L 61/2514
Translation of Internet protocol [IP] addresses: between local and global IP addresses