Benchmarking Database Performance in a Virtual Environment

Data center consolidation, for power and space conservation, has driven the steady development and adoption of virtualization technologies. This in turn has lead to customer demands for better metrics to compare virtualization technologies. The technology industry has responded with standardized methods and measures for benchmarking hardware and software performance with virtualization. This paper compares the virtualization technologies available today and existing benchmarks to measure them. We describe some real-life data center scenarios that are not addressed by current benchmarks and highlight the need for virtualization workloads that incorporate database-heavy computing needs. We present data from experiments running existing TPC database workloads in a virtualized environment and demonstrate that virtualization technologies are available today to meet the demands of the most resource–intensive database application. We conclude with ideas to the TPC for a benchmark that can effectively measure database performance in a virtual environment.