TOPOLOGY-BASED VIRTUAL SWITCHING MODEL WITH PLUGGABLE FLOW MANAGEMENT PROTOCOLS

摘要

The disclosure relates to technology for supporting multiple flow management protocols in a virtual network switch and changing a flow management protocol without changing switch topology configurations at run time. A data plane provider is detected via a pluggable software module (or plugin or plugin module) that identifies and controls the data plane provider with network interfaces and enables flow management protocols. A switch topology is then constructed by creating a virtual switch object, adding ports to the virtual switch object. A datapath is then created using the switch topology and the first flow management protocol on the data plane provider. Network interfaces are connect to each ports respectively to enable communication among the entities attached to each network interface according to the first flow management protocol. The datapath can be later changed to use the second flow management protocol and retain the same topology at run time.