Mirroring virtual network traffic

US11310241B2 · kind B2 · utility

Assignee

• MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING, LLC · US

Inventors

• Chandrasekar Srinivasan · Nagamangala, IN
• Neha Aggarwal · Seattle, US
• Deven Jagasia · Kirkland, US
• Fengfen Liu · Bellevue, US
• Karthik Ananthakrishnan · Woodinville, US
• Avijit Gupta · Redmond, US
• Ganesh Srinivasan · Woodinville, US
• Nisheeth Srivastava · Sammamish, US
• Rishabh Tewari · Sammamish, US
• Michal Czeslaw Zygmunt · Bellevue, US
• Harish Kumar Chandrappa · Bothell, US
• Gabriel Silva · Seattle, US
• Naveen Prabhat · Redmond, US
• Sumit Sharad Dhoble · Redmond, US
• Xinyan Zan · Sammamish, US
• Maitrey KUMAR · Redmond, US
• Wei Xia · Schreiber, CA

Key dates

• Filing date: Dec 27, 2018
• Grant date: Apr 19, 2022
• Expiry date: Sep 15, 2040

Classification

• Technology area (CPC H): Electricity
• CPC primary: H04L43/026
• WIPO field: Digital communication
• WIPO sector: Electrical engineering

Abstract

The disclosed system implements techniques to enable a tenant of a cloud-based platform to effectively and efficiently apply a policy that copies data packets communicated to or from a virtual machine in the tenant's own virtual network. When applied, the policy mirrors data traffic associated with a workload executing on a virtual machine in the tenant's virtual network. To mirror the data traffic, a copy of a data packet is streamed to another virtual machine so that network analytics can be performed (e.g., performance analytics, security analytics, etc.). In various examples, the policy can be a role-based mirroring policy that defines a plurality of roles in association with a role-based access model that scales operations and that provides improved security for a tenant's virtual network.