Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Diagnosing performance overheads in the xen virtual machine environment
Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments
C-store: a column-oriented DBMS
VLDB '05 Proceedings of the 31st international conference on Very large data bases
Super-Scalar RAM-CPU Cache Compression
ICDE '06 Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering
A comparison of software and hardware techniques for x86 virtualization
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Generic database cost models for hierarchical memory systems
VLDB '02 Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Very Large Data Bases
A common database approach for OLTP and OLAP using an in-memory column database
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data
Memory Performance and Cache Coherency Effects on an Intel Nehalem Multiprocessor System
PACT '09 Proceedings of the 2009 18th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques
The Star Schema Benchmark and Augmented Fact Table Indexing
Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Extending Database Technology
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Virtualization is mainly employed for increasing the utilization of a lightly-loaded system by consolidation, but also to ease the administration based on the possibility to rapidly provision or migrate virtual machines. These facilities are crucial for efficiently managing large data centers. At the same time, modern hardware --- such as Intel's Nehalem microarchitecure --- change critical assumptions about performance bottlenecks and software systems explicitly exploiting the underlying hardware --- such as main memory databases --- gain increasing momentum. In this paper, we address the question of how these specialized software systems perform in a virtualized environment. To do so, we present a set of experiments looking at several different variants of in-memory databases: The MonetDB Calibrator, a fine-grained hybrid row/column in-memory database running an OLTP workload, and an in-memory column store database running a multi-user OLAP workload. We examine how memory management in virtual machine monitors affects these three classes of applications. For the multi-user OLAP experiment we also experimentally compare a virtualized Nehalem server to one of its predecessors. We show that saturation of the memory bus is a major limiting factor but is much less impactful on the new architecture.