In general, techniques are described for dynamically load balancing among processing cores that a virtual router of a computing device uses to process network traffic associated with different workloads executing on the computing device. In some examples, a first computing device may assign, based on one or more metrics that indicate processing cores utilization or that indicate network traffic processing requirements for a workload that is to execute on a second computing device, network traffic processing for the workload to a first processing core of a plurality of processing cores of the second computing device. A virtual router, executing on the first processing core based on the assigning, may process network traffic for the workload.