The OpenFlow control channel is virtualized and isolated in the environment to ensure the efficiency in the network. Certain resources need to be virtualized by the FlowVisor for the guest controllers. For instance, a 32-bit integer is used by OpenFlow to identify the specific buffer where a packet is temporarily stored pending the forwarding decision being provided to the controller. FlowVisor must ensure that individual guest controllers access only their individual buffers.

Other messages that affect various slices such as link-down on a certain port are duplicated by FlowVisor to those respective ports.