Performance analysis of database virtualization with the tpc-vms benchmark

Abstract

TPC-VMS is a benchmark designed to measure the performance of virtualized databases using existing, time-tested TPC workloads. In this paper, we will present our experience in using the TPC-E workload under the TPCVMS rules to measure the performance of 3 OLTP databases consolidated onto a single server. We will describe the tuning steps employed to more than double the performance and reach 98.6% of the performance of a non-virtualized server – if we aggregate the throughputs of the 3 VMs for quantifying the tuning process. The paper will detail lessons learned in optimizing performance by tuning the application, the database manager, the guest operating system, the hypervisor, and the hardware on both AMD and Intel processors. Since TPC-E results have been disclosed with non-virtualized databases on both platforms, we can analyze the performance overheads of virtualization for database workloads. With a native-virtual performance gap of just a few percentage points, we will show that virtualized servers make excellent platforms for the most demanding database workloads.