SUMMARYThe design, development and maintenance of large virtual campuses are complex issues. This paper describes the architecture of a large university multiplatform virtual campus. Because we have not found virtual campus architectures described in the literature, the goal of this paper is to make our experience available to a wider audience so that organizations interested in the deployment of a large virtual campus can take advantage of our work. Thus, this paper analyzes this architecture from three different points of view: (i) software architecture; (ii) detailed software design; and (iii) hardware architecture. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.