Jennifer Glore

There are many virtualization options available to MySQL users.  One of these is the baremetal hypervisor, which is installed directly on the hardware and eliminates the need for a primary operating system.  Baremetal hypervisors are extremely flexible in that multiple operating systems can be supported on one system while increasing overall server utilization since multiple environments can run on one system.  Additionally, most enterprises see more flexibility over their environment and resources, higher levels of availability and security, increased efficiency, ease of migration, improved manageability, and a total lower cost of ownership.   Sun xVM Server falls under the baremetal hypervisor category.  My colleagues in Israel, Adina and Orgad, are helping us determine the best practices for running MySQL within xVM Server. 

For those of you who don't know much about Sun xVM Server, it is a reliable bare-metal hypervisor that is simple to install and easy to use. It is a freely downloadable virtualization platform for running unlimited heterogeneous guest operating systems on x86/x64 based hardware.  xVM Server is a level one hypervisor that is installed directly on the hardware and eliminates the need for a primary operating system. It is based on the open source Xen under a Solaris  environment on x86/x64 systems. Guest operating system support includes Windows, Linux (RedHat and SUSE), Solaris, and OpenSolaris.  It has a web based GUI that provides built-in management through a browser, enterprise-class scalability, reliability and security.  It can also be managed by xVM Ops Center. It provides some features from OpenSolaris underlying the guest OS, including Predictive Self Healing, ZFS, DTrace, advanced network bandwidth management and other security enhancements.  Sun xVM Server software is highly interoperable with VMware's ESX Server and Microsoft's Hyper-V. It uses the same virtual hard disk and virtual appliance formats, enabling customers to easily move workloads between VMware ESX and Sun xVM Server software seamlessly.   At the same time, it can export to Hyper-V's disk image format, VHD.

Given this functionality, Sun xVM Server is a viable virtualization solution for consolidating MySQL deployments.  An effective deployment of MySQL and xVM Server will lead to datacenter efficiency and Green Computing. 

Our team is currently looking at the optimal installation, configuration, and tuning for MySQL in various Sun xVM Server guests.  We're running a variety of performance tests with MySQL on Windows, Linux and Solaris to come up with best practices for running MySQL with xVM Server and to get a better understanding of MySQL performance characteristics in a virtualized environments.     Soon we'll have tips and tricks for installation, configuration, and tuning that is specific to the operating system you are using.  Additionally, we'll be able to tell you how to scale  MySQL out (many virtualized instances per system) and up (many threads / cores for each virtualized environement).

Stay tuned for more information.