Patent ID: 8867341

Claim:
A method of forwarding incoming traffic to servers in a group of servers, the method comprising: receiving a packet from a client system, the packet including a packet header with source and destination MAC (Media Access Control) address fields, source and destination IP (Internet Protocol) address fields, and source and destination service port fields; providing a switch device with a packet forwarding table for use in managing traffic across servers in a server group, the packet forwarding table having a plurality of table entries, each table entry mapping a hash value to a server in the server group; redirecting incoming traffic to the packet forwarding table before computing a hash value; computing, by the switch device, the hash value from data in one or more fields of the packet header of the received packet; using, by the switch device, the computed hash value as an index into the packet forwarding table to access a table entry therein and to identify, from the table entry, the server in the server group to which the table entry maps the computed hash value; and forwarding, by the switch device, the packet to the identified server.