Fortinet, Inc.
CONFIGURATION OF SUB-INTERFACES TO ENABLE COMMUNICATION WITH EXTERNAL NETWORK DEVICES

Abstract:

Systems and methods for facilitating communication between applications associated with virtual domains (VDOMs) of a virtualized network device and an external network are provided. According to one embodiment, a sub-interface is created for a physical Ethernet interface of the network device. A unique MAC address is assigned to the sub-interface. An application associated with a first VDOM is bound to the sub-interface. When the first VDOM is operating in transparent mode and an egress packet is received via the sub-interface by an internal switch running on the network device: (i) a forwarding database of the network device is caused to learn an association between a source MAC address of the egress packet and the sub-interface; and (ii) the egress packet is transmitted to the external network device via the physical Ethernet interface without replacing the source MAC address with the unique MAC address of the sub-interface.