System and method for router virtual networking

A host router 10 is logically partitioned into virtual router domains 12, 14, 16 that manage independent processes 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 and routing application copies but share a common operating system 18, 20. Each v-net manages an independent set of sockets 32, 33, 34, 35 36 and host router interfaces 42, 43, 45, each associated with only one v-net at one time, but interchangeably repartitionable Traffic is removed from an interface during repartitioning. Duplicate arrays of global variables copied to each v-net are accessed by macro references. A v-net facility can separate route tables 46, 48, 50 used internally from the externally visible route tables and can avoid conflicts between internal and external IP addresses 13, 15, 17 that share the same identifier. For example a common FreeBSD operating system supports a dynamic routing protocol (DRP) application 23, 25. Each v-net runs an independent copy of the DRP software and is logically independent. A failure in one DRP copy does not adversely affect other copies.