Abstract: Techniques for centralized management of network switch operations across multiple virtualization platforms via a “spanned distributed virtual switch.” These techniques generally include creating a distributed virtual switch for each virtual platform that participates in the spanned distributed virtual switch, configuring each such distributed virtual switch with a mutually exclusive set of ports, configuring each distributed virtual switch with network configuration information for associated sets of ports, and synchronizing the network configuration information across distributed virtual switches. When configuration information changes in one distributed virtual switch, those changes are synchronized across other distributed virtual switches that participate in the spanned distributed virtual switch. A computer system, method, and computer-readable medium are provided herein.

Abstract: A technique for providing fault tolerance for virtual machines in a hybrid cloud computing system is discussed. When a primary virtual machine (VM) in a private data center is configured for fault tolerance, a secondary VM is instantiated in a public cloud computing system. Changes to the execution state of the primary VM are recorded and relayed to the secondary VM by way of caching modules, which provide acknowledgements messages back to the primary VM. A technique for failback from the public cloud computing system to the private data center is also discussed.

Abstract: Techniques for facilitating parallelized configuration of multiple virtual machines. The techniques include duplicating commands received from an administrator and controlling the multiple virtual machines with those commands in a parallel manner. Different types of commands are treated differently. More specifically, commands for controlling software executing in the virtual machines are replicated and sent to each virtual machine. By contrast, commands for managing virtual machines themselves are provided to virtualization software like a hypervisor to be executed. Duplication of the commands for controlling software executing in the virtual machines is performed by an input/output multiplexer, which also has the function of combining display output from each of the virtual machines. More specifically, the input/output multiplexer displays a common display output to the administrator, where the common display output is the screen that is shown on each of the virtual machines.