Research And Implementation Of Advertising MAC Address Of Geographically Dispersed Data Centers

With the rapid development of network technology, the data center is becoming the most critical facilities in most enterprise networks. For a company, many enterprise data centers are located in several different geographical locations to achieve the reliability of the network services. In order to enhance the fluidity of the resources and the flexibility of management between multiple data centers, the data center must provide the Layer2network connectivity between the off-site data center without prejudice to the overall stability of the network. The traditional Layer2forwarding can only be carried on in the LAN based on the MAC address. So it is important to extend the Layer2to advertise the MAC address information of offsite sites. The standard ISIS protocol is altered according to the data center requirements, and an advertising scheme about the MAC address information based on the ISIS protocol is proposed in paper.The proposed scheme is implemented by the software in a communication company R&D platform. The software is finished by multithreading mechanism including four threads, which are called handling system events thread, maintaining neighbors thread, maintaining LSP thread and maintaining routes thread. The handling system events thread is responsible for system preparations and scheduling. The maintaining neighbors thread is responsible for maintaining the site’s relationship of neighbors and the local MAC information. The LSP maintenance thread is responsible for generating LSP packets, synchronizing LSP packets and extracting MAC information from LSP. The maintaining routes thread is responsible for processing and brushing remote MAC information.Finally, the system function of the designed software is tested on the actual device. Test results show that the local device’s MAC address information is advertised to the remote device and the MAC address forwarding table about offsite devices is set up on the local device. The results have achieved the expected requirements of addvertising MAC address.