Methods and systems to achieve multi-tenancy in RDMA over converged Ethernet

A method for providing multi-tenancy support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) in a system comprising a plurality of physical hosts, each physical host hosting a set of data compute nodes (DCNs), wherein a first physical host comprises a physical forwarding element (PFE) implementing a logical forwarding element (LFE), wherein a first DCN hosted on the first host is connected to a port of the LFE through a virtual network interface controller (NIC), the method comprising:

• at an RDMA protocol stack of the first host, receiving a packet comprising a request from the first DCN for RDMA data transfer from a second DCN hosted on a physical second host;
• from a set of parameters of a first tunnel endpoint of an overlay network associated with the first DCN and a set of parameters of a second tunnel end point associated with the second DCN, determining a first set of parameters of the overlay network;
• sending the first set of parameters of the overlay network associated with the first DCN to a physical RDMA NIC of the first host;
• and
• determining said port of the LFE is associated with the first tunnel endpoint of the overlay network,
• wherein the set of parameters are for the physical RDMA NIC to encapsulate the packet with (i) an RDMA data transfer header and (ii) an overlay network header using the set of parameters of the overlay network for transferring the encapsulated packet to the second physical host using the overlay network.

A first physical host for hosting a set of data compute nodes (DCNs) and providing multi-tenancy support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) for the DCNs, the physical host comprising:

• a physical RDMA network interface controller (NIC);
• at least one processing unit;
• and
• a non-transitory machine readable medium storing an RDMA protocol stack for execution by the processing unit to:
• receive a packet comprising a request from a first DCN hosted on the first host for RDMA data transfer from a second DCN hosted on a second host;
• and
• send a set of parameters of an overlay network associated with the first DCN to the RDMA physical NIC;
• the RDMA physical NIC configured to:
• use the set of parameters to encapsulate the packet with (i) an RDMA data transfer header and (ii) an overlay network header using the set of parameters of the overlay network;
• and
• send the encapsulated packet to the second physical host using the overlay network;
• receive RDMA data from the second DCN at the RDMA NIC;
• and
• insert the RDMA data from the RDMA NIC into a memory buffer of the DCN to bypass an operating system of the first host and a virtualization software of the first host.

A first physical host for hosting a set of data compute nodes (DCNs) and providing multi-tenancy support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) for the DCNs, the physical host comprising:

• a physical RDMA network interface controller (NIC);
• at least one processing unit;
• and
• a non-transitory machine readable medium storing an RDMA protocol stack for execution by the processing unit to:
• receive a packet comprising a request from a first DCN hosted on the first host for RDMA data transfer from a second DCN hosted on a second host, wherein the first DCN is connected to a port of a logical forwarding element (LFE) through a virtual NIC, the LFE implemented by a physical forwarding element (PFE) of the first host;
• determine said port of the LFE is associated with a first tunnel endpoint of the overlay network;
• and
• send a set of parameters of an overlay network associated with the first DCN to the physical RDMA NIC, said set of parameters of the overlay network determined from a set of parameters of the first tunnel endpoint and a set of parameters of a second tunnel end point associated with the second DCN;
• the physical RDMA NIC configured to:
• use the set of parameters to encapsulate the packet with (i) an RDMA data transfer header and (ii) an overlay network header using the set of parameters of the overlay network;
• and
• send the encapsulated packet to the second physical host using the overlay network.