RELATED APPLICATIONS

Benefit is claimed under 35 U.S.C. 119(a)-(d) to Foreign Application Serial No. 201741042815 filed in India entitled “AGENT-BASED NETWORK SCANNING IN SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING (SDN) ENVIRONMENTS”, on Nov. 29, 2017, by NICIRA, INC., which is herein incorporated in its entirety by reference for all purposes.

BACKGROUND

Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.

Virtualization allows the abstraction and pooling of hardware resources to support virtual machines in a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) environment, such as a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). For example, through server virtualization, virtual workloads such as virtual machines running different operating systems may be supported by the same physical machine (e.g., referred to as a “host”). Each virtual machine is generally provisioned with virtual resources to run an operating system and applications. The virtual resources may include central processing unit (CPU) resources, memory resources, storage resources, network resources, etc.

Through SDN, benefits similar to server virtualization may be derived for networking services. For example, logical overlay networks that are decoupled from the underlying physical network infrastructure may be configured. Similar to a physical network, logical switches and logical routers may to provide respective layer-2 switching and layer-3 routing services to virtual machines. In practice, address information (e.g., hardware address information, network address information, etc.) associated with workloads in an SDN environment may be useful for various purposes, such as automated configuration, management, security assessment, etc. However, it may be challenging to retrieve the address information, especially when the workloads are deployed in different networks.

