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

Claim 0:
1. A method comprising:
querying, at a designated edge node, for multicast reports, wherein the designated edge node is one of a plurality of edge nodes in a cluster of edge nodes for forwarding data from 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 each distributed router is implemented by virtualization software running on one or more host machines;
receiving, at two or more edge nodes of the cluster of edge nodes, multicast reports in response to said querying;
compiling, at the two or more edge nodes of the cluster of edge nodes, membership information for one or more multicast groups based on the received multicast reports; and
forwarding multicast traffic to and from the distributed routers according to the 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.