Patent ID: 7844709

Claim:
In an information handling system in which resources of one or more physical machines are allocated among a group of logical partitions, a method for reallocating the resources among the partitions, comprising the steps of: receiving a resource request message from a requesting partition in the group of logical partitions for additional resources from another partition in the group of logical partitions; in response to receiving the resource request message, sending an assessment request message to the other partition requesting that the other partition assess whether it has resources available for the requesting partition; receiving from the other partition an assessment response message indicating whether it has resources available for the requesting partition; in response to receiving the assessment response message, sending a message to the requesting partition informing it whether resources are available from another partition; wherein the requesting partition and the other partition each have a performance index associated therewith, the performance index being based on a delay-to-using ratio, and in which the resource request message and the assessment response message from these partitions each specify a current performance index of the respective partition and a projected performance index of the respective partition with the additional resources reallocated, the method comprising the further steps of: determining net changes in the performance indexes of the requesting partition and the other partition resulting from reallocation of the additional resources from the other partition to the requesting partition; and effecting a resource reallocation from the other partition to the requesting partition only if the net change in the performance index of the requesting partition is greater than the net change in the performance index of the other partition.