Virtual machine technologies offer simple and practical mechanisms to addressmany manageability problems in database systems. For example, thesetechnologies allow for server consolidation, easier deployment, and more flexibleprovisioning. Therefore, database systems are increasingly being run onvirtual machines. This offers many unique opportunities for database research. However, it is also important to understand thecost of virtualization. Virtual machine technologies add a layer of indirection between applications and the hardware that they use (e.g. CPU, memory, disk). This added complexity results in a performance overhead for software systems running in a virtual machine. In this thesis, we present an experimental study of the overhead of running a database workload in a virtual machine. Using a TPC-H workload running on PostgreSQL in a Xenvirtual machine environment, we show that Xen does indeed introduce overheadfor system calls, page fault handling, and disk I/O. However, these overheadsdo not translate to a high overhead in query execution time. We show that in all cases theaverage overhead is less than 10% and, therefore, conclude that the advantages of running a database system in a virtualmachine do not come at a high cost in performance.
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A Performance Evaluation of Database Systems on Virtual Machines
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