Outbound Traffic Flow; Inbound Traffic Flow (Slb Only) - Dell Broadcom NetXtreme Family of Adapters User Manual

assigned to a different port.
Figure 2. Intermediate Driver

Outbound Traffic Flow

The Broadcom Intermediate Driver manages the outbound traffic flow for all teaming modes. For outbound traffic, every
packet is first classified into a flow, and then distributed to the selected physical adapter for transmission. The flow
classification involves an efficient hash computation over known protocol fields. The resulting hash value is used to index into
an Outbound Flow Hash Table.The selected Outbound Flow Hash Entry contains the index of the selected physical adapter
responsible for transmitting this flow. The source MAC address of the packets will then be modified to the MAC address of the
selected physical adapter. The modified packet is then passed to the selected physical adapter for transmission.
The outbound TCP and UDP packets are classified using Layer 3 and Layer 4 header information. This scheme improves the
load distributions for popular Internet protocol services using well-known ports such as HTTP and FTP. Therefore, BASP
performs load balancing on a TCP session basis and not on a packet-by-packet basis.
In the Outbound Flow Hash Entries, statistics counters are also updated after classification. The load-balancing engine uses
these counters to periodically distribute the flows across teamed ports. The outbound code path has been designed to achieve
best possible concurrency where multiple concurrent accesses to the Outbound Flow Hash Table are allowed.
For protocols other than TCP/IP, the first physical adapter will always be selected for outbound packets. The exception is
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), which is handled differently to achieve inbound load balancing.

Inbound Traffic Flow (SLB Only)

The Broadcom intermediate driver manages the inbound traffic flow for the SLB teaming mode. Unlike outbound load
balancing, inbound load balancing can only be applied to IP addresses that are located in the same subnet as the load-
balancing server. Inbound load balancing exploits a unique characteristic of Address Resolution Protocol (RFC0826), in which
each IP host uses its own ARP cache to encapsulate the IP Datagram into an Ethernet frame. BASP carefully manipulates the
ARP response to direct each IP host to send the inbound IP packet to the desired physical adapter. Therefore, inbound load
balancing is a plan-ahead scheme based on statistical history of the inbound flows. New connections from a client to the
server will always occur over the primary physical adapter (because the ARP Reply generated by the operating system
protocol stack will always associate the logical IP address with the MAC address of the primary physical adapter).
Like the outbound case, there is an Inbound Flow Head Hash Table. Each entry inside this table has a singly linked list and