Database Virtualization: A New Frontier for Database Tuning and Physical Design

Resource virtualization is currently being employed at all levels of the IT infrastructure to improve provisioning and manageability, with the goal of reducing total cost of ownership. This means that database systems will increasingly be run in virtualized environments, inside virtual machines. This has many benefits, but it also introduces new tuning and physical design problems that are of interest to the database research community. In this paper, we discuss how virtualization can benefit database systems, and we present the tuning problems it introduces, which relate to setting the new "tuning knobs" that control resource allocation to virtual machines in the virtualized environment. We present a formulation of the visualization design problem, which focuses on setting resource allocation levels for different database workloads statically at deployment and configuration time. An important component of the solution to this problem is modeling the cost of a workload for a given resource allocation. We present an approach to this cost modeling that relies on using the query optimizer in a special virtualization-aware "what-if" mode. We also discuss the next steps in solving this problem, and present some long-term research directions.