Vertical Scaling of Virtual Machines In Cloud Environment

Abstract

Virtual Machine (VM) scaling in cloud is a common technique followed in cloud infrastructures to efficiently make use of the VM instances to get more throughput. There are two major scaling approaches which are being followed these days namely Horizontal Scaling and Vertical Scaling. The horizontal scaling is widely used as compared to the vertical scaling due to its ease of implementation and profit measure whereas the implementation of vertical scaling is more complex. The Vertical Scaling is accomplished using the Hypervisor tool - Virtual Box. We make use of the CLI provided by the Virtual Box to vertically scale the VMs. Python script is written to take care of all the edge cases that could be encountered in the vertical VM scaling. In addition to this, user activity statistics are logged to the database accompanying with the changes to the allotted VMs. A web interface is provided to the user/administrator to keep track of the changes in the VM environment in different user sessions. Scaling of different VM parameters like RAM & VRAM size, Usage of number of CPUs and Availability of different audio controller types are discussed in this paper. This paper proposes a cost effective method to implement vertical scaling of VM in cloud architecture.