Abstract: Systems and methods for domain management in a virtualized computing environment are provided. In one embodiment, the method comprises collating advice received from one or more domain advisors connected in the virtualized computing environment; resolving any conflicts among the advice received from said one or more domain advisors; utilizing the collated advice to generate a placement plan comprising a plurality of operations for virtual machines in said virtualized computing environment; and executing the one or more operations in the placement plan, wherein one or more domain handlers may be called to update the virtualized computing environment before, during or after execution of one or more operations from among said plurality of operations in the plan.

Abstract: A programmable multispeed communication apparatus includes a plurality of identical media access control (MAC) units for use with a programmable data processing system. The MAC units when multiplexed and connected to a communication media achieve a transmission speed n·s where n is the number of MAC units and s is the speed of the individual MACs. If one or more but not all of the MAC units fail, the apparatus will operate in degraded mode with the remaining active MAC units. User frames are sequentially numbered, partitioned into sequentially numbered partitions which are assigned to one or more MAC's. Each of the partitions includes a prefix which includes the sequential frame number, the sequential partition number and an indicator for distinguishing the last partition of a frame from the other partitions of that frame.