Generally described, computing devices utilize a communication network, or a series of communication networks, to exchange data. Companies and organizations operate computer networks that interconnect a number of computing devices to support operations or provide services to third parties. The computing systems can be located in a single geographic location or located in multiple, distinct geographic locations (e.g., interconnected via private or public communication networks). Specifically, data centers or data processing centers, herein generally referred to as a “data center,” may include a number of interconnected computing systems to provide computing resources to users of the data center. The data centers may be private data centers operated on behalf of an organization or public data centers operated on behalf, or for the benefit of, the general public.
To facilitate increased utilization of data center resources, virtualization technologies may allow a single physical computing device to host one or more instances of virtual machines that appear and operate as independent computing devices to users of a data center. Each single physical computing device can be generally referred to as a host computing device. With virtualization, the single physical computing device can create, maintain, delete, or otherwise manage virtual machines in a dynamic matter. In turn, users can request computer resources from a data center, including single computing devices or a configuration of networked computing devices, and be provided with varying numbers of virtual machine resources.
In conjunction with the utilization of virtualization technologies, data centers can physically organize sets of host computing devices to allow the host computing devices to share computing device resources, such as power or communication network connectivity. Such physical organization can correspond to physical racks in which the hosting computing devices are mounted, generally referred to as racks of host computing devices. As the number of racks of host computing devices increases, service providers associated with data centers have difficulty distinguishing between errors or faults associated with individual host computing devices, shared resources associated with a particular rack or distributed components utilized to manage the host computing devices. Additionally, in some scenarios, service providers may maintain multiple data centers. In such scenarios, the service providers would benefit from the determination of the availability of multiple data centers and the inter-data center synchronization of state information.