The present invention relates generally to the field of network communications, and more particularly to controlling the network connections utilized by multi-path data transmissions protocols.
In a distributed computing environment, large volumes of information can be stored on systems that are optimized for data storage, such as a network-attached storage (NAS) system and/or a storage area network (SAN). The execution of software and programs can be deployed to hardware that supports virtual systems (e.g., virtual machines). In addition, various components within a computing system can be virtualized, such as network switches and communication adapters. A virtual machine (e.g., an application server) can be dynamically configured (e.g., computational speed, multitasking, high-volume network traffic, response time, reliability, etc.) and optimized for the applications executed on the virtual machine (VM). In contrast, some objectives of utilizing NAS and/or SAN systems, as opposed to integrating data storage on a computing system hosting VMs, are: improved availability (e.g., fault-tolerance), improved performance (e.g., bandwidth), improved scalability, and improved maintainability (e.g., disaster recovery processes).
Various network topologies exist that can enable the communication between a computing system hosting VMs and a SAN storing the information utilized by a VM. A mesh network topology provides at least two nodes with two or more communication paths between the nodes, which provides redundant paths for the communications. In addition, various communication protocols can be utilized within a communication network. Some networking protocols (e.g., Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP)) are implemented on the communication adapters (e.g., host bus adapters), which reduces the resource demands on central processing units (CPUs) within a computing system and/or a SAN. Other networking protocols can take advantage of the redundant paths within some networks to increase the bandwidth of information transfer. Two such protocols are Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) and Multi-path Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP). In addition, various virtualization technologies can be applied to communication ports of a computing system and/or a SAN. In one instance, virtualizing port IDs improves the isolation of VMs utilizing the same physical port on a SAN.