Cloud Virtual Machine Allocation

Concerns

When a user request for a virtual machine in the cloud, the cloud provider needs to allocate a VM for the user.

There are three concerns a cloud provider needs to take into account when doing the VM allocation.

• Load Balance
• Power Consumption
• Security
• For security, we aim to avoid the cloud covert channel attacks in which an attacker seeks to be co-locate with the target VM in order to extract private information from the victims. 

Popular VM Allocation Policies

The following table [1] shows the popular VM allocation policies.

Reference

[1] Using Virtual Machine Allocation Policies to Defend against Co-resident Attacks in Cloud Computing, by Yi Han et al, in Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing