Patent ID: 8819211

Claim:
A method comprising: retrieving, by a policy module, a deprecated policy from a local cache managed by the policy module; encapsulating data, by the policy module, initiated by a first virtual machine with a deprecated physical path translation that corresponds to the deprecated policy; sending the encapsulated data, by the policy module, to a second virtual machine through a destination policy module; receiving, at the policy module, a message from the destination policy module that the deprecated policy is invalid; sending a policy request, by the policy module, to a first policy server in response to receiving the message from the destination policy module that the deprecated policy is invalid; receiving, at the first policy server, the policy request from the policy module; identifying the first virtual machine and the second virtual machine that correspond to the policy request, wherein the first virtual machine is assigned to a first subnet and corresponds to a first virtual network, the first virtual network also including one or more third virtual machines assigned to a different subnet; selecting a policy that corresponds to sending the data from the first virtual machine to the second virtual machine and includes one or more logical references to the first virtual network; identifying a physical path translation that corresponds to the selected policy; and sending the physical path translation to the policy module.