Patent ID: 8064462

Claim:
A system for providing Internet Protocol (IP) services, comprising: a switch fabric; a line interface/network module coupled to the switch fabric; a plurality of virtual routing engines (VREs) coupled to the switch fabric; and a virtual services engine (VSE), coupled to the switch fabric, including at least one central processing unit configured to perform firewall processing, Uniform Resource Locator (URL) filtering and anti-virus processing; wherein the line interface/network module receives packets and steers ingress packets across the switch fabric to a selected VRE of the plurality of VREs and transmits egress packets according to their relative priority; wherein the line interface/network module includes an egress forwarding manager which applies priority queuing to the egress packets based on DiffServ marking and transmits the egress packets out of the line interface/network module; wherein the selected VRE determines if a packet associated with a packet flow requires processing by the VSE by performing flow-based packet classification on the packet and evaluating forwarding state information associated with previously stored flow learning results based on a previously received packet of the packet flow; and if the packet is determined to require processing by the VSE, then steering the packet across the switch fabric to the VSE for one or more of the firewall processing, the URL filtering and the anti-virus processing.