Patent ID: 11962499
Assignee: VMWARE LLC
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H  G | IPC G  H

Claim 14:
15. A hypervisor in a host computer configured to implement multitenancy by maintaining mappings between underlying hardware on the host computer and virtual resources allocated to a service machine that provides one or more services to a plurality of tenants, the hypervisor comprising a memory encoded computer instructions causing one or more processors to perform the following operations:
detecting a packet implemented in the hypervisor;
based on metadata received along with the packet, identifying a tenant identifier;
determining a plurality of attributes of the packet;
based on the tenant identifier and the plurality of attributes of the packet, retrieving an action for the packet from a rule table;
based on the action, determining whether at least one service is to be applied to the packet;
in response to determining that the at least one service is to be applied to the packet:
making a copy of the packet;
storing the copy of the packet;
generating an encapsulated packet by encapsulating the packet with the tenant identifier;
directing the encapsulated packet to a service machine that is configured to provide the at least one service to the encapsulated packet;
upon receiving a result from the service machine providing the at least one service to the encapsulated packet:
determining, based on the result, whether to forward the encapsulated packet toward a packet destination or drop the encapsulated packet; and

in response to determining that the encapsulated packet is to be forwarded toward the packet destination, deleting or overwriting the encapsulated packet and forwarding the copy of the packet toward the packet destination; or
in response to determining that the encapsulated packet is to be dropped, deleting or overwriting the encapsulated packet and deleting the copy of the packet.