Using context switches for VM scaling

Virtualisation encourages users to procure, relin-quish and scale resources frequently. Such fluid deployments require continuous performance assessment to inform resource allocation. In current systems Tick Accounting, Load Average, and Memory Usage are used to judge system performance and to trigger resource scaling. We argue that the readily available Context Switch (CS) counter is also an effective performance indicator. We demonstrate the efficacy of CS and show that it can also be used as base for scaling decisions.