Patent 9413644 was granted and assigned to Nicira on August, 2016 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A logical routing element (LRE) having multiple designated instances for routing packets from physical hosts (PH) to a logical network is provided. A PH in a network segment with multiple designated instances can choose among the multiple designated instances for sending network traffic to other network nodes in the logical network according to a load balancing algorithm. Each logical interface (LIF) of an LRE is defined to be addressable by multiple identifiers or addresses, and each LIF identifier or address is assigned to a different designated instance.