Investigating suitability for server virtualization using business application benchmarks

Server virtualization is now required for data center systems to reduce the number of servers. However, it is still unclear which business applications are suitable for virtualization. We present our evaluation results for four types of business application benchmarks on our virtualization system. The results show that the virtualization performance of a TPC-H workload, which mainly executes referencing on a database, uses about 90% of the non-virtualized performance, and that the virtualization performance of the TPC-H workload is better than that of the other benchmark applications. The results of a new performance characteristic for virtualization indicated that application programs, which have performance bottlenecks in disk I/Os and low CPU utilizations in a non-virtualized environment, are suitable for virtualization.