High-Performance Main-Memory Database Systems and Modern Virtualization: Friends or Foes?

Virtualization owes its popularity mainly to its ability to consolidate software systems from many servers into a sin-gle server without sacrificing the desirable isolation between applications. This not only reduces the total cost of owner-ship, but also enables rapid deployment of complex software and application-agnostic live migration between servers for load balancing, high-availability, and fault-tolerance. However, virtualization is no free lunch. To achieve isola-tion, virtualization environments need to add an additional layer of abstraction between the bare metal hardware and the application. This inevitably introduces a performance overhead. High-performance main-memory database sys-tems are specifically susceptible to additional software ab-stractions as they are closely optimized and tuned for the underlying hardware. In this work, we analyze in detail how much overhead modern virtualization options introduce for high-performance main-memory database systems. We eval-uate and compare the performance of HyPer and MonetDB under three modern virtualization environments for analyt-ical as well as transactional workloads. Our experiments show that the overhead depends on the system and virtual-ization environment being used. We further show that main-memory database systems can be efficiently deployed in vir-tualized cloud environments such as the Google Compute Engine and that “friendship ” between modern virtualization and main-memory database systems is indeed possible