Virtual machine selection scheme considering reliability for cloud services

Users require cloud providers to provide cloud services with suitable cost and acceptable reliability. They provide users the resources (e.g., bandwidth and processing) of virtual machines running on physical machines. A conventional virtual machine selection scheme adopts only a cloud provider that satisfies the acceptable reliability. The total cost of usage sometimes becomes unnecessarily high, since highly reliable cloud providers provide a high-cost service. This paper proposes a virtual machine selection scheme considering reliability for the cloud service. The proposed scheme satisfies the user's acceptable reliability using multiple cloud providers with a suitable cost and the acceptable reliability, while minimizing their total cost of usage. We formulate the virtual machine selection problem as a linear programming problem. Our simulation demonstrates that the proposed scheme reduces cost, compared to the conventional scheme.