Patent ID: 11895010
Assignee: VMWARE LLC
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 6:
7. A system comprising:
one or more distributed routers, each distributed router implemented by virtualization software running on one or more host machines; and
a cluster of edge nodes for forwarding data from the one or more distributed routers to one or more uplink physical routers and for forwarding data from the uplink physical routers to the distributed routers,
wherein one edge node in the cluster of edge nodes is a designated edge node that queries for membership information for one or more multicast groups,
wherein at least two edge nodes in the cluster of edge nodes receive the membership information in response to said queries, compile membership information for one or more multicast groups based on the received multicast reports, and forward multicast traffic to and from the distributed routers according to the received membership information;
wherein a distributed router uses a look-up table, that returns a list of edge nodes in the cluster of edge nodes as available next-hops, to forward multicast packets to the uplink physical routers, uses a multicast group identifier as a hash key to compute a hash value, and then uses the hash value to select an edge node from the list of edge nodes for forwarding the multicast packets to the uplink physical routers.