US Patent 10230576 Managing administrative statuses of hardware VTEPs

Some embodiments provide a novel method for a network control system (or controllers of the network control system) to manage a set of hardware Virtual Tunnel End Points (VTEPs) used to implement a logical network. Many network devices or entities (such as interfaces or transport nodes) have a functionality to mark the device or entity as “administratively down”. In that mode, such a device does not participate in any further forwarding in the dataplane, until it is marked as administratively up. This feature is often used to troubleshoot networks, and/or to remove misbehaving or faulty devices.