Patent attributes
Various examples of the present disclosure provide methods for unifying various types of end-point identifiers, such as IPv4 (e.g., Internet protocol version 4 represented by a VRF and an IPv4 address), IPv6 (e.g., Internet protocol version 6 represented by a VRF and an IPv6 address) and L2 (e.g., Layer-2 represented by a bridge domain (BD) and a media access control (MAC) address), by mapping end-point identifiers to a uniform space (e.g., a synthetic IPv4 address and a synthetic VRF) and allowing different forms of lookups to be uniformly handled. In some examples, a lookup database residing on a switch device can be sharded into a plurality of lookup table subsets, each of which resides on a different one of multiple switch chipsets (e.g., Tridents) in the switch device.
