Techniques are provided for detecting and identifying host devices in a network. At a switch device, a packet is received from a server that is interfaced with a switch device and is configured to host a virtual machine that is a source of the packet. A Media Access Control (MAC) address or an Internet Protocol (IP) address is identified. The MAC address and IP address are associated with the virtual machine. In response to identifying the MAC or IP addresses, the switch device determines whether a binding between the IP and MAC addresses of the virtual machine is present in a database of addresses accessible by the switch device. If the association is not present, based on the fields obtained from the packet header, a request message is sent to the virtual machine to resolve the association between the IP address and the MAC address of the virtual machine.