Abstract: An efficient distributed architecture for forwarding packets. The packet to be forwarded arrives in an ingress port, is processed by an ingress forwarding engine, transferred to an egress forwarding engine, and then transmitted via an egress port. An address-based lookup at the ingress forwarding engine identifies the correct egress forwarding engine and also identifies a translation index specifying the forwarding equivalence class (e.g., combination of address prefix and mask) of the packet. The egress forwarding engine then uses the translation index as a memory pointer to recover adjacency information with which to rewrite the packet header. The egress forwarding engine may maintain its adjacency information entirely locally without the need to share the information or propagate updates to ingress forwarding engines. This approach results in a scalable and highly efficient packet forwarding architecture.

Abstract: A system and method detects and responds to failures occurring in a virtual switch. The virtual switch is formed from two or more physical switches interconnected by a Virtual Switch Link (VSL). One physical switch is elected the Master, and it executes a link aggregation protocol for the virtual switch. If the VSL fails, one of the other physical switches assumes that it should become the Master for the virtual switch, and it begins executing the link aggregation protocol. By adding information unique to the physical switches in the control packets of the link aggregation protocol, remote switches can identify when the VSL fails, and report this condition to the original Master. In response, the original Master or the new Master takes corrective action.

Abstract: Method and devices are provided for implementing high availability. Some implementations provide high availability for virtual switches of data networks. Each virtual switch acts as a single logical unit, while encompassing at least two physical chassis, referred to herein as a master chassis and a slave chassis. In some preferred embodiments, the active supervisor in the master chassis is configured as an active supervisor of the virtual switch and the active supervisor in the slave chassis is configured as the standby supervisor of the virtual switch.

Abstract: Method and devices are provided for implementing high availability. Some implementations provide high availability for virtual switches of data networks. Each virtual switch acts as a single logical unit, while encompassing at least two physical chassis, referred to herein as a master chassis and a slave chassis. In some preferred embodiments, the active supervisor in the master chassis is configured as an active supervisor of the virtual switch and the active supervisor in the slave chassis is configured as the standby supervisor of the virtual switch.