Patent ID: 8369345

Claim:
A multi-router system comprising: at least one standalone router comprising: a routing engine; a plurality of packet forwarding engines to forward network packets in accordance with forwarding information; a set of network interface cards coupled to each of the packet forwarding engines by a switch fabric that forwards packets between the plurality of packet forwarding engines of the standalone router; at least two tunnel interface cards to form network tunnels; and a control system coupled to the standalone router, the control system comprising a plurality of routing engines, wherein each of the routing engines of the control system is associated with a different partition of the packet forwarding engines and the network interface cards of the standalone router, including at least one of the tunnel interface cards, to form a plurality of hardware logical routers, wherein at least two of the plurality of hardware logical routers are configured to communicate with a shared one of the interface cards of the standalone router via the tunnel interface cards, and wherein the tunnel interface cards of the hardware logical routers forward packets to the shared one of the interface cards of the standalone router by receiving outbound tunneled packets from the hardware logical routers destined for a network and looping the tunneled packets back to the hardware logical routers as inbound packets received from the network via a tunnel.