Patent ID: 8886838

Claim:
A method for transferring a packet, comprising: receiving the packet by a physical network interface, wherein the packet comprises a destination address, wherein the destination address corresponds to a first Internet Protocol (IP) address for a virtual network interface card (VNIC); determining a VNIC physical location using the destination address and a virtual switching table (VST), wherein the VST is located on a physical network express manager (NEM), wherein the VNIC is located on a computer operatively connected to the NEM via a chassis interconnect, and the VNIC is executing on a host operating system (OS) in the computer, wherein the chassis interconnect comprises a Peripheral Component Interface Express (PCI-E) backplane, and wherein the VST comprises an association between the first IP address, and the VNIC physical location comprising a PCI-E endpoint on the PCI-E backplane; transferring the packet to a receive ring (RR) associated with the VNIC, wherein the RR is located on the NEM; determining, by the VNIC, that the packet is in the RR; providing the NEM with a receive descriptor, wherein the receive descriptor is a pointer to a memory location in a guest OS memory associated with a guest OS executing on the host OS; transferring the packet to the guest OS memory from the RR in the NEM using the receive descriptor; and notifying the guest OS that the packet is in the guest OS memory.