A system and an article of manufacture for facilitating customer-initiated virtual machine (VM) migration and swapping include obtaining documentation of at least one performance parameter of two or more virtual machines running on two or more physical machines, obtaining a request for a virtual machine exchange from a user of a first virtual machine, wherein the request comprises a preference for at least one desired performance parameter in at least one additional virtual machine, matching the request from the user of the first virtual machine with at least one additional virtual machine that includes the at to least one desired performance parameter without assistance from a cloud provider, and exchanging the first virtual machine with a virtual machine from the at least one additional virtual machine that includes the at least one desired performance parameter.