Explicit congestion notification in a virtual environment

A method of reducing network congestion in a virtual network, the method comprising, at a first cloud forwarding element (CFE) of the virtual network:

• receiving a plurality of encapsulated data packets of a data stream, the encapsulated data packets having been encapsulated by a second CFE, operating on a server of the virtual network, wherein the second CFE:
• identifies a memory usage percentage and a CPU usage percentage of the server;
• sets first explicit congestion notification (ECN) bits on a percentage of non-encapsulated data packets based on the memory usage percentage and sets second ECN bits of a percentage of the non-encapsulated data packets based on the CPU usage percentage;
• and
• encapsulates each non-encapsulated data packet to generate an encapsulated data packet;
• and
• determining whether to forward a new connection to the second CFE based on at least one of the percentage of data packets from the second CFE with the first ECN bits set and the percentage of data packets from the second CFE with the second ECN bits set.

A machine readable medium storing a program which when executed by one or more processing units reduces network congestion in a virtual network, the program comprising sets of instructions for, at a first cloud forwarding element (CFE) of the virtual network:

• receiving a plurality of encapsulated data packets of a data stream, the encapsulated data packets having been encapsulated by a second CFE, operating on a server of the virtual network, wherein the second CFE:
• identifies a load percentage of the server;
• sets explicit congestion notification (ECN) bits on a percentage of non-encapsulated data packets based on the load percentage of the server;
• and
• encapsulates each non-encapsulated data packet;
• and
• determining whether to forward a new connection to the second CFE based at least on the percentage of data packets received from the second CFE with the ECN bits set.