VM Provisioning Method to Improve the Profit and SLA Violation of Cloud Service Providers

Cloud computing is an emerging technology in the IT world. Some features of cloud, such as low cost, scalability, robustness and availability are attracting large-scale industries as well as small businesses towards cloud. A virtual machine (VM) is a software that can run its own operating system and applications just like an operating system on a physical computer. As the number of users increases, allocation of resources and scheduling become a complex task in a cloud. In a federated cloud environment when resource requirements of user requests exceed resource limits of cloud provider, to fulfil the requests the cloud provider can out-source to other cloud providers' resources. Under these circumstances it is desirable to minimize the Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. This can be achieved through load balancing. This paper proposes a load balancing algorithm that is threshold based. We consider two types of pricing models for VMs, on-demand and reserved. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reduces the SLA violations.