Reducing the cost of framing network packets in a virtual machine environment combines certain network objects to eliminate the cost of fully framing packets between the combined objects. In a virtual environment, for example, this allows a virtual NIC in one partition to send only data to a network provider partition and to rely on the latter to frame and route the data. A source network object, destination network object, or an intermediate network object may enable a separate intermediate network object to frame its data so that the network system may take advantage of offload framing when one or more of the intermediate network object's ports has the capacity to offload framing.