Patent ID: 8295275

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a virtual queue to store packets received from and transmitted to a network interface card (NIC); a global session manager coupled to the virtual queue to manage packet communication with a capability operating system (COS) in a virtualized environment, the virtualized environment being included in a memory; a global virtual machine (VM) database coupled to the global session manager to store global session identifiers (SIDS) of the packets and associated metadata, the global SIDS being used by the global session manager to track network sessions by looking up the associated metadata, the metadata describing characteristics of session connections; and a VM tunnel connection coupled to the session manager and the COS to encapsulate the packets passing to and from the COS, the VM tunnel connection being one of a shared memory segment and a dynamically mapped memory page; wherein the global session manager comprises a global packet classification and tagging module (PTCM) to associate a packet with a global session identifier (SID), the global SID providing index to look up the associated metadata in the global VM database and to assign input/output traffic; and a global SID manager to maintain the global SIDS in the global VM database.