Methods and systems are provided for routing traffic through a virtual router-based network switch. According to one embodiment, a method for routing packets in a router includes establishing a flow data structure, which identifies a packet flow through a virtual router in the router. When a packet is received, a comparison is performed between a subset of at least one packet header associated with the packet and a subset of the flow data structure. If the subset of the packet header matches the subset of the flow data structure, then the packet can be hardware accelerated to a network interface. Otherwise, the packet may be either dropped or forwarded to a general purpose processor for processing.