Hardware assisted flow acceleration and L2 SMAC management in a heterogeneous distributed multi-tenant virtualized clustered system

A non-transitory computer readable medium having stored thereon instructions for facilitating network address translation in a virtualized, comprising executable code which when executed by one or more processors causes the processors to perform steps comprising:

• assigning a set of continuous available source media access control (SMAC) addresses stored in a region of a MAC table to a network traffic management cluster comprising one or more virtual network traffic management devices;
• establishing a connection in response to a request from one of the virtual network traffic management devices that received a packet associated with a new flow;
• inserting a flow table entry comprising an index to the MAC table into a flow table in a hardware-based data flow segment (DFS), wherein the flow table entry can be identified based on a key generated from a flow signature of the packet and the index corresponds to a MAC table entry in the MAC table storing one of the SMAC addresses corresponding to the one of the virtual network traffic management devices;
• and
• transforming the packet associated with the connection using the one of the SMAC addresses as a source address of the received packet and send the received packet to a destination network device.

One or more network traffic management devices comprising:

• memory comprising programmed instructions stored in the memory;
• and
• one or more processor configured to be capable of executing the programmed instructions stored in the memory to:
• assign a set of continuous available source media access control (SMAC) addresses stored in a region of a MAC table to a network traffic management cluster comprising one or more virtual network traffic management devices;
• establish a connection in response to a request from one of the virtual network traffic management devices that received a packet associated with a new flow;
• insert a flow table entry comprising an index to the MAC table into a flow table in a hardware-based data flow segment (DFS), wherein the flow table entry can be identified based on a key generated from a flow signature of the packet and the index corresponds to a MAC table entry in the MAC table storing one of the SMAC addresses corresponding to the one of the virtual network traffic management devices;
• and
• transform the packet associated with the connection using the one of the SMAC addresses as a source address of the received packet and send the received packet to a destination network device.

A method for facilitating network address translation in a virtualized network traffic management cluster, the method comprising:

• assigning, by a network traffic management device, a set of continuous available source media access control (SMAC) addresses stored in a region of a MAC table to a network traffic management cluster comprising one or more virtual network traffic management devices;
• establishing, by the network traffic management device, a connection in response to a request from one of the virtual network traffic management devices that received a packet associated with a new flow;
• inserting, by the network traffic management device, a flow table entry comprising an index to the MAC table into a flow table in a hardware-based data flow segment (DFS), wherein the flow table entry can be identified based on a key generated from a flow signature of the packet and the index corresponds to a MAC table entry in the MAC table storing one of the SMAC addresses corresponding to the one of the virtual network traffic management devices;
• and
• transforming, by the network traffic management device, the packet associated with the connection using the one of the SMAC addresses as a source address of the received packet and send the received packet to a destination network device.