US Patent 11190406 Injecting network endpoints into a SDN

A virtual network comprising virtual machines executing at a computing environment is implemented. A flexibly extensible NIC (eNIC) is executed at a software defined networking (SDN) appliance. A data packet is received that is addressed to a host that is connected to the virtual network. Based on a layer 2 address and a network identifier, the virtual switch identifies the host represented by the eNIC that is associated with the data packet. A policy associated with the host is determined and applied to the data packet. The policy is dynamically adjustable based on the host.