US Patent 8990807 Virtual instance reconfiguration

In a virtual computing environment allocating instantiations of computing resources based on a computing metric of a primary application for execution on the instantiated computing resources, an instance manager increases allocated computing resources in response to a performance shortfall. The virtual computing environment executes virtualization instances of computing systems as an autonomous computing entity in a physical environment shared with other virtualization instances. Each virtualization instance has a configuration including a processor type and quantity, memory, and mass storage (i.e. disk) allocation. Further, each virtualization instance has a performance capacity (capacity) based on a performance metric for identifying throughput in terms of a target application that the virtualization instance was designated to support. The instance manager performs a substantially real-time reconfiguration response based on an impact analysis that configures additional computing resources (virtualization instances) based on an actual, not computed or projected, demand.