Performance Impact of Type-I Virtualization on a NewSQL Relational Database Management System

Abstract

For more than 40 years, the relational database management system (RDBMS) and the atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID) transaction guarantees provided through its use have been the standard for data storage. The advent of Big Data created a need for new storage approaches that led to NoSQL technologies, which rely on basic availability, soft-state, eventual consistency (BASE) transactions. Over the last decade, NewSQL RDBMS technology has emerged, providing the benefits of RDBMS ACID transaction guarantees and the performance and scalability of NoSQL databases. The reliance on virtualization in IT has continued to grow, but an investigation of current academic literature identified a void regarding the performance impact of virtualization of NewSQL databases. To help address the lack of research in this area, a quantitative experimental study was designed and carried out to answer the central research question, "What is the performance impact of Type-I virtualization on a NewSQL RDBMS?" VMware ESXi virtualization software, NuoDB RDBMS, and OLTP-Bench software were used to execute a mixed-load benchmark. Performance metrics were collected comparing bare metal and virtualized environments, and the data analyzed statistically to evaluate five hypotheses related to CPU utilization, memory utilization, disk and network input-output (I/O) rates, and database transactions per second. Findings indicated a negative performance impact on CPU and memory utilization, as well as network I/O rates. Performance improvements were noted in disk I/O rates and database transactions-per-second.