In the example above, data on each port of the network adapter is mapped to a separate client VM. However, this limits the solution by the number of physical ports on the network adapter.

A more interesting solution is to use logical ports.

Some intelligent network adapters are capable of identifying flows and thus defining logical ports providing specific flow data. These logical ports can be mapped to VMCI ports allowing specific data to be distributed to dedicated network appliances running on client VMs. The number of virtual ports that can be supported is limited by the implementation on the network adapter, but can be up to 32.

As mentioned, it is not uncommon for multiple network appliances to need to access the same data at the same point in the network at the same time. The captured data needs to be shared and replicated to multiple network appliances.