Patent ID: 7877485

Claim:
A computerized system comprising: one or more computing devices, each computing device including hardware including one or more processors; one or more virtual machine (VM) environments implemented by the computing devices, each VM environment hosting a guest operating system (OS) and one or more application computer programs capable of running on the guest OS, the guest OS and the application computer programs of each VM environment constituting a session allocatable to a user; and, a connection broker implemented by the computing devices to maintain a state machine as to states of the sessions and to permit transitions among the states in response to messages, commands, and internal decisions, wherein the states comprise: an offline state, an online-down state, an online-up state, a suspended state, an active state, an idle state, a disconnected state, and a failed state, wherein the offline state indicates that a session is unavailable for allocation, the online-down state and the online-up state directly transitionable to the offline state without having to pass through any intervening state, the offline state directly transitionable to the online-down state and the online-up state without having to pass through any intervening state, and when the session is initially added or created, the offline state is exited upon removal or destruction of the session wherein the online-down state indicates that a session is virtually powered down but available for allocation, the offline state, the online-up state, and the failed state directly transitionable to the online-down state without having to pass through any intervening state, and the online-down state directly transitionable to the offline state and the online-up state without having to pass through any intervening state, and wherein the online-up state indicates that a session is virtually powered up and available for allocation, the offline state, the online-down state, and the suspended state directly transitionable to the online-up state without having to pass through any intervening state, and the online-up state directly transitionable to the offline state, the online-down state, the suspended state, and the failed state without having to pass through any intervening state.