Performance profiling of database systems in Xen

In recent years, many database systems have been deployed in virtualized cloud platforms to take advantage of the general benefits of virtualization and cloud computing. However, deploying database systems in such environments poses some challenges that should be addressed. The performance of database systems can degrade due to the various overheads introduced by the virtualization including CPU, memory, disk, and network overheads. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of MySQL in-disk database and DB2 in-memory database in Xen virtualized environment. Our experimental results show that the performance of MySQL degrades dramatically if it runs in Xen while the performance of DB2 in Xen is comparable with that in the native environment. Moreover, the performance of DB2 is much higher than MySQL in Xen environment. These observations indicate that in-memory databases such as DB2 are good candidates to be migrated to Xen-based cloud platforms.