Patent ID: 8675491

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: an integrated circuit including switch circuitry to determine, at least in part, an action to be executed involving a packet, determination of the action being based, at least in part, upon flow information determined, at least in part, from the packet, and packet processing policy information, the switch circuitry being to examine, at least in part, the policy information to determine, at least in part, whether a previously-established packet processing policy has been established that corresponds, at least in part, to the flow information; if the switch circuitry determines, at least in part, that the previously-established policy has not been established, the switch circuitry is to place the packet in a queue and increment a counter indicating, at least in part, a number of packets in the flow that are in the queue; and if, after the packet has been placed in the queue, the packet becomes a head of the queue and no action has been indicated, at least in part, in a tuple corresponding at least in part to the flow information, the switch circuitry is to carry out the action after the action has been indicated, at least in part, in the tuple, the tuple to be stored in the integrated circuit, the tuple to store values in mutual association with each other, the values representing the flow information, the action, and the counter; wherein the action is to be selected so as to implement desired application targeted packet routing to route certain packets to selected virtual machine queues that belong to virtual machines executing desired applications in accordance with packet-flow-based quality of service prioritization.