ENHANCED HOST DISCOVERY IN SDN/FABRIC-BASED NETWORKS

Various solutions are provided herein to facilitate the efficient discovery of hosts in large network environments, such as software-defined networking (SDN) or fabric-based networks, utilizing several techniques. A first technique supports the ability to efficiently manage silent ports and silent media access control (MAC) addresses. This technique involves applying a novel heuristic to ports and MAC addresses, classifying such entities (as silent, quiet, and noisy), and intelligently polling such entities. A second technique supports a Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD)-based host discovery approach that is applicable to Internet Protocol (IP) version 4 (IPv4) and involves a host creating an IP version 6 (IPv6) address that embeds its IPv4 address, the addition of a well-known first byte to the three bytes in a Solicited-Node multicast address (SNMA), and the use of a form of unicast ping to confirm whether a host formed a derived address. A third technique involves using a service lookup for deterministic host discovery that involves the use of upper-layer discovery services to cause a host to expose its addresses in the replies to multicast discoveries