Virtualization and databases

There is currently a lot of interest in resource virtualization as an important technique for addressing the problems of manageability, reliability, and security in computer systems. Resource virtualization decouples the user's perception of hardware and software resources from the actual implementation of these resources. It adds a flexible and programmable layer of software between user applications (such as database systems) and the resources that they use. This layer of software maps the virtual resources perceived by the applications to real physical resources. An example of this layer of software is a virtual machine monitor, which partitions the resources of a machine (CPU, disk, memory, network, etc.) into multiple virtual machines, and independent operating systems and applications can be installed on each virtual machine. The power of resource virtualization comes from the ability to manage the mapping from virtual resources to physical resources in the virtualization layer, and to change it as needed.The trend towards virtualization is of interest to us in the database research community because database systems are increasingly being run in virtualized environments. This presents a major opportunity since virtualization can help in solving many important problems in the areas of database system usability, manageability, deployment, scalability, and availability. Leveraging the capabilities of virtualization to solve these problems will require some effort on the part of our community. At the same time, virtualization poses some unique research challenges that must be addressed to enable database systems to run efficiently in these virtualized environments that are becoming increasingly common. In this tutorial, we will introduce resource virtualization and how it affects database systems. We will present the opportunities that resource virtualization provides for database systems and the unique research challenges that it poses, and we will review ongoing research in this area.