Patent attributes
The present disclosure describes a type of virtual machine, which the present disclosure may refer to as a harvest virtual machine, that may allow improved utilization of physical computing resources on a cloud-computing system. First, the harvest virtual machine may be evictable. In other words, higher priority virtual machines may preempt the harvest virtual machine's access to physical computing resources. Second, the harvest virtual machine may receive access to a dynamic amount of physical computing resources during the course of its operating life. Third, the harvest virtual machine may have a minimum size (in terms of an amount of physical computing resources) and may terminate whenever the harvest virtual machine has access to an amount of physical computing resources less than the minimum size.