RISC to x86, Physical to Virtual
April 21, 2009 – 1:12 pmMany of the virtualization customers I speak with have been asking about what database can be virtualized, so I typically present a green, yellow and red set of criteria to help guide the process. We typically look at I/O rates, SMP width and capacity of the source physical system as a guide. Recently, we were able to run a full TPC-C like workload inside a virtual machine, showing that we can run at over 90% efficiency, even given the brutal nature of this workload (it's I/O rate is actually about 6 times higher than what you would typically see in a customer workload). The methodology is that green is considered for the easy databases -- typically 2 CPUs or less and less than 500 disk I/O's per second. These virtualize easy, with minimal best practices required. Yellow is for larger databases, where the I/O rate is higher -- they typically need more ...
