Fault tolerant routing in a non-hot-standby configuration of a network routing system

A system comprising:

• one or more active processing engines, each of the one or more active processing engines being associated with a plurality of server blades of a network routing system and having one or more software contexts;
• one or more non-hot-standby processing engines, each of the one or more non-hot-standby processing engines having no pre-created software contexts corresponding to the software contexts of the one or more active processing engines;
• and
• a control blade configured to detect a fault associated with an active processing engine of the one or more active processing engines, and, in response, to dynamically replace the active processing engine with a non-hot-standby processing engine of the one or more non-hot-standby processing engines by creating one or more replacement software contexts within a non-hot-standby processing engine corresponding to the one or more software contexts of the active processing engine.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium tangibly embodying a set of instructions, which when executed by one or more processors associated with a control blade of a plurality of server blades of a network routing system or a plurality of processing engines of the plurality of server blades cause the one or more processors to perform a failover method comprising:

• monitoring one or more active processing engines, each of the one or more active processing engines being one of a plurality of processing engines associated with a plurality of server blades of a network routing system and having one or more software contexts;
• and
• responsive to detecting as fault associated with an active processing engine of the one or more active processing engines, dynamically replacing the active processing engine with a non-hot-standby processing engine by creating one or more replacement software contexts within the non-hot-standby processing engine corresponding to the one or more software contexts of the active processing engine,
• wherein the non-hot-standby processing engine is one of a group of one or more non-hot-standby processing engines, each of the one or more non-hot-standby processing engines having no pre-created software contexts corresponding to the software contexts of the one or more active processing engines prior to the one or more replacement software contexts being created within the non-hot-standby processing engine.