This paper introduces a distributed shared memory Java Virtual Machine architecture. This project is targeted for any distributed message-passing architecture, and specifically for networks of workstations. The whole system is implemented in user space, which offers portability and flexibility. The memory consistency is provided by one of four protocols implementing Release Consistency. The novelty of the consistency protocols presented is that access faults are avoided by replicating objects ahead-of-time where necessary. The relative performance of these protocols is evaluated for three benchmark applications. Our experimental results indicate that, in the majority of cases, update protocols outperform invalidate protocols.