Some embodiments provide a method for defining a gateway component of a logical router. The method assigns each of several uplinks to different gateway machines. For one of the uplinks, the method defines a first centralized gateway component of the logical router for implementation on a first gateway machine to which the uplink is assigned. The method defines a first local interface for the first gateway component configured according to the uplink. The first local interface for the first gateway component forwards traffic to a network external to the implementation of the logical router. The method defines a second interface for the first gateway component configured according to a second uplink. The second interface is for redirecting traffic processed according to the second uplink configuration to a second centralized gateway component implemented on a second gateway machine. The second gateway component forwards the traffic to the external network.

Streaming media is problematic for thin clients using remoting protocols like RDP that were never designed to handle the volume of data associated with multimedia. The result is large demands on the host computer and thin client CPU and excessive bandwidth on the network, which results in a poor display quality. A process running on a host computer detects an existing multimedia acceleration channel to a thin client and also identifies unaccelerated media streams like Adobe Flash. The unaccelerated content is automatically re-encoded using a codec format supported by the thin client acceleration channel. This results in a significant improvement in the quality of the streaming media displayed on the thin client and overall reductions in host CPU load, network bandwidth and thin client CPU load. No additional software is required on the thin clients to support new media types including Adobe Flash.

A novel design of a gateway that handles traffic in and out of a network by using a datapath pipeline is provided. The datapath pipeline includes multiple stages for performing various data-plane packet-processing operations at the edge of the network. The processing stages include centralized routing stages and distributed routing stages. The processing stages can include service-providing stages such as NAT and firewall. The gateway caches the result previous packet operations and reapplies the result to subsequent packets that meet certain criteria. For packets that do not have applicable or valid result from previous packet processing operations, the gateway datapath daemon executes the pipelined packet processing stages and records a set of data from each stage of the pipeline and synthesizes those data into a cache entry for subsequent packets.

Techniques are described for utilizing Protocol Independent Multicast Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) to transport BUM (broadcast, unknown unicast, and multicast) traffic in a Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) underlay of a data center, where the BUM traffic is received on active-active, multi-homed Ethernet virtual private network (EVPN) interconnects between multiple physical data centers. For example, the techniques may readily be applied to support usage of PIM-SM where provider edge (PE) routers of the EVPN operate as gateways between the EVPN and the VXLAN spanning the data center interconnect.

One embodiment of the present invention provides a switch in a network of interconnected switches. The switch includes a network extension module, which maintains a mapping between a first virtual local area network (VLAN) identifier and a first global VLAN identifier of a network extension group. The network extension group is represented by a range of global VLAN identifiers for a tenant. A global VLAN identifier is persistent in a respective switch of the network and represents a virtual forwarding domain in the network. During operation, the network extension module includes the global VLAN identifier in a packet belonging to the first VLAN.

A system monitors metrics relating to link flapping associated with a physical link in a ring network. Network management traffic is transported via a first VLAN and customer data traffic is transported via a second VLAN. The system maintains a signal fail state for the ring network based on the monitored metrics. If a first condition associated with the first VLAN is detected, the system disallows customer data traffic on the second VLAN. If a second condition associated with the monitored metrics is detected, the system disallows network management traffic on the first VLAN and disallows customer data traffic on the second VLAN, resulting in the signal fail state. If the second condition is no longer met, the system allows network management traffic on the first VLAN. If the first condition is no longer met, the system allows customer data traffic on the second VLAN, resulting in the idle state.

A novel design of a gateway that handles traffic in and out of a network by using a datapath daemon is provided. The datapath daemon is a run-to-completion process that performs various data-plane packet-processing operations at the edge of the network. The datapath daemon dispatches packets to other processes or processing threads outside of the daemon. Datapath operations at lower layers of the network protocol model are processed by the datapath daemon within its run-to-completion thread, while datapath operations at higher layers of the network protocol model are processed by data plane processes external to the datapath daemon.

Streaming media is problematic for thin clients using remoting protocols like RDP that were never designed to handle the volume of data associated with multimedia. The result is large demands on the host computer and thin client CPU and excessive bandwidth on the network, which results in a poor display quality. A process running on a host computer detects an existing multimedia acceleration channel to a thin client and also identifies unaccelerated media streams like Adobe Flash. The unaccelerated content is automatically re-encoded using a codec format supported by the thin client acceleration channel. This results in a significant improvement in the quality of the streaming media displayed on the thin client and overall reductions in host CPU load, network bandwidth and thin client CPU load. No additional software is required on the thin clients to support new media types including Adobe Flash.

Some implementations provide a method for managing switches in a data center that includes: (1) establishing a connection from one switch to another switch in the data center, the data center providing a plurality of virtual local area networks (VLANs), each VLAN including at least one Virtual Machine and capable of spanning across more than one of the plurality of switches; (2) provisioning device prefixes for IPv6 addresses, a given device prefix corresponding to a particular VLAN on a particular switch in the data center, the given device prefix included in a host address of a particular virtual machine, the particular virtual machine hosted on a server computer, the sever computer connected to the particular switch without additional intervening switches; (3) configuring a hardware memory to include prefix information and address information; and (4) transferring packets by using the prefix information and the address information.

A novel design of a gateway that handles traffic in and out of a network by using a datapath pipeline is provided. The datapath pipeline includes multiple stages for performing various data-plane packet-processing operations at the edge of the network. The processing stages include centralized routing stages and distributed routing stages. The processing stages can include service-providing stages such as NAT and firewall. The gateway caches the result previous packet operations and reapplies the result to subsequent packets that meet certain criteria. For packets that do not have applicable or valid result from previous packet processing operations, the gateway datapath daemon executes the pipelined packet processing stages and records a set of data from each stage of the pipeline and synthesizes those data into a cache entry for subsequent packets.