US Patent 7885276 Isolating network traffic in multi-tenant virtualization environments

Managing data in a server system includes providing a plurality of servers, each having an internal gateway/switch that is accessible from outside the server, providing a plurality of virtual servers on at least some of the servers, where each of the virtual servers is accessible by the internal gateway/switch of the corresponding server, and accessing the data using the internal gateway/switch, where the internal gateway/switch determines which particular one of the virtual servers contain the data and then accesses the particular virtual server to provide the data. Managing data in a server system may also include associating portions of the data to tenants of the server system. Each of the servers may maintain a table that correlates tenants with the virtual servers maintained thereby and the internal gateway/switch may use the table to determine which particular one of the virtual servers contains data for a particular tenant.