Patent ID: 7933269

Claim:
A method for packet multicasting in a virtual routing system, the method comprising: receiving a multicast packet at an ingress system of a packet-forwarding engine (PFE) of the virtual routing system, the virtual routing system including one or more virtual service engines (VSEs) and a flow manager configured to load balance service requests to the one or more VSEs; the ingress system identifying a plurality of flow classification indices for the multicast packet; for each instance of multicasting, the ingress system sending a single copy of the multicast packet and the plurality of flow classification indices to an egress system of the PFE; buffering the single copy of the multicast packet in a memory accessible by the egress system; and the egress system preparing the multicast packet for transmission by for each flow classification index of the plurality of flow classification indices, identifying corresponding transform control instructions based on the flow classification index, reading the single copy of the multicast packet from the memory, causing the multicast packet to be transformed in accordance with the identified transform control instructions and outputting the transformed multicast packet.