Patent ID: 7346909

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: one or more processors; and an agent program instantiable into a first agent process of a first virtual machine operated by one of the one or more processors and a second agent process of a second virtual machine operated by one of the one or more processors, the first and second agent processes adapted to first cooperate to ensure that a port of the apparatus is listened to by only a first application of the first virtual machine and by the second agent process of the second virtual machine, the second agent listening on the port on behalf of the first application to achieve synchronization of first and second network communication stacks of the first and second virtual machines, and said first cooperate includes trapping by the first agent process a first request from the first application to the first network communication stack of the first virtual machine requesting to listen on the port, and in response, notifying by the first agent process the second agent process of the listen request; and second cooperate to facilitate the first application and a second application of the second virtual machine in communicating with each other in a network-like manner.