Patent ID: 11863514
Assignee: VMWARE LLC
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC G  H

Claim 13:
14. A method of load balancing data message flows across a plurality of secure connections, the method comprising:
receiving a data message having source and destination addresses formatted according to a first protocol;
based on the source and destination addresses, selecting one of the plurality of secure connections for the data message, wherein each of the secure connections handles a first set of connections formatted according to the first protocol and a second set of connections formatted according to a second protocol that is an alternative to the first protocol; and
securely encapsulating the data message and forwarding the encapsulated data message onto a network, wherein the encapsulation comprises an identifier for the selected secure connection,
wherein the method is performed by a first gateway device and the securely encapsulated data message has an outer destination address of a second gateway device that receives the securely encapsulated data message and assigns the data message to a particular one of its processing cores based on the identifier for the selected secure connection,
wherein the first gateway device selects among the plurality of secure connections by load balancing across the secure connections such that the data messages received at the second gateway device are load balanced among the processing cores of the second gateway device.