US Patent 7424710 TCP/IP offloading for virtual machines

An engine (TOE) is provided in a virtualized computer system for offloading I/O tasks using any defined protocol such as TCP/IP. The system includes a virtual machine (VM), which has a guest operating system (OS) that runs via a virtual machine monitor (VMM) on a system-level software platform (vmkernel), which also forms the software interface layer to at least one physical network connection device. A TCP/IP stack is included in vmkernel. During normal I/O operation, for sockets associated with TOE, processes in an application layer in the guest OS are able to communicate directly with vmkernel's TCP/IP stack, thereby bypassing the guest OS kernel.