Patent attributes
Some embodiments of the invention provide a forwarding element that has a data-plane circuit (data plane) that can be configured to implement one or more load balancers. The data plane has several stages of configurable data processing circuits, which are typically configured to process data tuples associated with data messages received by the forwarding element in order to forward the data messages within a network. However, in some embodiments, the configurable data processing circuits of the data plane can also be configured to implement a load balancer in the data plane that forwards message flows to different nodes of a node group. This load balancer includes a set of one or more storages to store several address mapping sets with each address mapping set corresponding to a different set of nodes in the node group. It also includes a destination selector that receives a set identifier for each message flow, and selects a node for the message flow from the mapping set identified by the set identifier received for the message flow.
