Research And Implementation Of Cluster Management Technology For Ethernet Switch

With the rapid development of Ethernet technology, the scale of Ethernet LAN becomes so huger than usual, and the number of the Switches has been increasing, it needs some new technology to satisfy this new requirement in the management of the Switches. The Switch Stack is not the best choice, because of its expensive upgrade and bad expansibility; besides, the number of switches in a stack is not enough. The Cluster Management Technology appears on this background.Through topological collection, the Cluster Management Technology congregates the Switches at different places to a cluster, and it uses the unified managemental channel to manage this cluster. Therefore, the network resource is saved and the efficiency is improved.Firstly, the thesis takes an overview of the several usual methods of network management, and the advantages of the Cluster Management Technology are analyzed. After that, the definition of the packet format of Cluster Management Protocol is introduced, and the principle and the process of Cluster Management Protocol are described in detail. As the most important part of this thesis, the protocol's implement discusses particularly some key problems in the software design, such as the definition of data structure, receiving and sending messages, implement of state machine and the forward interface etc., then the solution is represented and implemented. The technology has been implemented on a switch and it runs well. At last, the function testing is made on a switch implementing the Cluster Management Protocol, and the result is presented. In addition, an Ethernet instance is given.