Automatic Virtual Machine Configuration for Database Workloads

Virtual machine monitors are becoming popular tools for the deployment of database management systems and other enterprise software applications. In this paper, we consider a common resource consolidation scenario, in which several database management system instances, each running in a virtual machine, are sharing a common pool of physical computing resources. We address the problem of optimizing the performance of these database management systems by controlling the configurations of the virtual machines in which they run. These virtual machine configurations determine how the shared physical resources will be allocated to the different database instances. We introduce a virtualization design advisor that uses information about the anticipated workloads of each of the database systems to recommend workload-specific configurations online. Furthermore, runtime information collected after the deployment of the recommended configurations can be used to refine the recommendation. To es...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Ahmed A. Soror, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, Peter Kokosielis, Sunil Kamath, Umar Farooq Minhas
• Keywords: Resource Consolidation, Virtual Machine Con Figuration, Virtualization