In order to communicate with each other in a network, clients resolve each other's network and hardware address to ensure that communications are routed to the correct recipients. In traditional techniques, this involves broadcasting or multicasting of Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) messages for IPv4 and/or Neighbor Discovery (ND) messages for IPv6 on the network, which can result in significant network traffic and resource usage. Such broadcast address discovery messages may be flooded across clients and switch ports within very large network domains and thereby consume considerable network bandwidth. The problem of network bandwidth consumption by broadcast address discovery messages is exacerbated by the relatively recent growth in the availability of virtual networking environments that implement virtual machines as the proliferation of virtual machines creates a corresponding increase in the number of Internet Protocol (IP) address to hardware address mappings. Thus, existing techniques for address resolution that employ broadcast or multicast messages and deplete bandwidth may be inefficient and/or inadequate for virtual networking environments, as well as for other usage scenarios.