Methods and systems for load balancing a plurality of entities, such as
firewalls, in a network environment are disclosed. In particular, the
load balancing of firewalls on a bidirectional traffic path is performed
using a single device that controls both incoming and outgoing traffic
through the firewalls. The single device may include virtual routers for
controlling the bidirectional traffic through the firewalls. A first
virtual router may control incoming traffic to the firewalls and the
other virtual router may control outgoing traffic to the firewalls. The
virtual routers are logical partitions of the device layered on the
physical resources of the device. The virtual routers share all or
portions of the physical resources of the single device.