Patent ID: 7965714

Claim:
A method for processing a packet, comprising: receiving the packet by a physical network interface, wherein the packet comprises a destination address; determining a target virtual network interface card (VNIC) using the destination address and a virtual switching table (VST), wherein the VST is located on a network express manager (NEM) and the target VNIC is located on a target computer operatively connected to the NEM via a chassis interconnect; transferring the packet to a receive ring (RR) associated with the target VNIC, wherein the RR is located on the NEM; determining, by the target VNIC, that the packet is in the RR; determining, by the target VNIC, that the packet is to be processed using an offload engine; transferring the packet to offload memory located on an offload computer, wherein the offload computer is operatively connected to the NEM via the chassis interconnect and wherein the offload engine is executing on the offload computer; processing the packet by the offload engine to obtain a processed packet; and transferring the processed packet to a target computer memory using the chassis interconnect, wherein the chassis interconnect comprises a Peripheral Component Interface Express (PCI-E) backplane, and wherein the VST comprises a mapping of the target VNIC to a PCI-E endpoint on the PCI-E backplane.