US Patent 10554484 Control plane integration with hardware switches

Some embodiments provide a managed hardware forwarding element (MHFE) controller that serves as an intermediary between one or more central controllers in a central control plane (CCP) cluster and one or more third-party hardware devices (e.g., physical switches and routers, applicances such as firewalls, load balancers, etc.). The MHFE controller of some embodiments uses (i) a first protocol to communicate with the CCP cluster and (ii) a second protocol to communicate with the one or more third-party devices managed by the MHFE controller, thereby enabling the CCP cluster to distribute logical network configuration information to the physical workloads (e.g., third-party servers connected to a third-party Top of Rack (TOR) switch).