Comments on: Sun xVM VirtualBox is released!

By: Eric Day

Eric Day — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:20:07 +0000

Very cool, thanks for sharing! I *almost* bought Parallels a couple weeks ago, and now I'm glad I didn't. :)

One comment on MySQL usage though, virtualization may not be worthwhile due to the extra I/O layers. Also, if you have the images for two (or more) virtual machines running MySQL on the same physical hard drive, they are doing to compete for the raw I/O performance, ultimately slowing things down more. For small databases this may be fine, but if you're trying to utilize all your cores, you're going to hit I/O issues first. You could always dedicate one (or more) physical hard drives to each virtual machine image running a database, but this won't scale too well once we hit 32-core CPUs! :)

By: synack

synack — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:03:10 +0000

Ops, forgot to mention that it has to be enabled (PAE support)

By: synack

synack — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:02:22 +0000

Hi,

The changelog says (v-1.6.0):
* Experimental Physical Address Extension (PAE) support

Now, install as usual and finish installation, it should boot normally… It’s OK on my Leopard & VB-1.6.0 and ubuntu lts 32-bit (8.04)

By: Arjen Lentz

Arjen Lentz — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:46:38 +0000

For db servers, virtualisation is generally not a sensible solution for production/performance. For testing, great.

By: byte

byte — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:13:39 +0000

Hi Eric!

Good to note that you can now save money :)

With regards to virtualization, a certain large whale in the database market, has certified their stack in a virtualized platform. Xen seems to be all the rage…

There’s Xen, KVM/Qemu, VMware, and now VirtualBox and xVM… While I do understand the I/O issues you mention, maybe virtualization works well for shared hosting environments? Beats me, I think we need to study it carefully…

I wish I had some more time, and if I do, I’ll be sure to “slap”[1] mysql inside a virtualised environment just to see what kind of use case scenarios it can be used for.

Also, keep in mind that mysql has traditionally always been scale out… Sun’s got lots of cool hardware that does scale up (CMT chips for instance). There must be some “middle ground” or use cases…

kind regards

[1] – slap, via mysqlslap… and other benchmarking tools, I’m sure

By: Eric Day

Eric Day — Sun, 04 May 2008 20:07:45 +0000

Very cool, thanks for sharing! I *almost* bought Parallels a couple weeks ago, and now I’m glad I didn’t. :)

One comment on MySQL usage though, virtualization may not be worthwhile due to the extra I/O layers. Also, if you have the images for two (or more) virtual machines running MySQL on the same physical hard drive, they are doing to compete for the raw I/O performance, ultimately slowing things down more. For small databases this may be fine, but if you’re trying to utilize all your cores, you’re going to hit I/O issues first. You could always dedicate one (or more) physical hard drives to each virtual machine image running a database, but this won’t scale too well once we hit 32-core CPUs! :)