Patent ID: 8429276

Claim:
A method comprising: partitioning, with a hypervisor executing within a network device, physical resources of the network device to allocate a first portion of the physical resources to a first virtual machine and a second portion of the physical resources to a second virtual machine; executing the first and second virtual machines within the respective first and second partitions of the physical resources to process first and second portions of network traffic received by the network device; determining, with the first virtual machine executing within the first partition of physical resources of the network device, whether physical resources in addition to those allocated in the first partition are required to process the first portion of the incoming network traffic; requesting, with the first virtual machine, additional physical resources of the network device based on the determination; dynamically reallocating at least a portion of the physical resources allocated to the second partition to the first partition in response to the request so as to form an expanded first partition of the physical resources in which the first virtual machine executes to process the first portion of the incoming network traffic and a reduced second partition in which the second virtual machine executes to process the second portion of the incoming network traffic; executing the first virtual machine within the expanded first partition to process the first portion of the incoming network traffic; and executing the second virtual machine within the reduced second partition to process the second portion of the incoming network traffic.