Virtualized Database Survey Results

Survey Results

Virtualization is now ubiquitous for x86 servers, but what about databases? To find out, SolarWinds ran a THWACK survey April 2020 to see the level of virtualized databases within our user community and other characteristics related to their database environment.

The results were on target with virtualization overall, with 87.8% of respondents saying their databases ran in virtual machines.

Figure 1 - Percent of databases running in a Virtual Machine (VM)—SolarWinds THWACK Survey

When it came to which hypervisors were used, VMware was by far the most used with 90.1% of respondents. Microsoft Hyper-V was a distant second with 28.3% followed by Azure VM at 22%.

The next category in the survey was interesting when it came to the most virtualized databases. This was not only due to Microsoft SQL Server being the most virtualized at 93.3%, but the number of open-source databases running in a virtual machine (VM). MySQL was the third-most virtualized database platform, no surprise given its growing popularity. PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MariaDB ranked ahead of IBM DB2 and SAP ASE (Sybase), showing the growth of open source.

Figure 2—The most virtualized database platforms—SolarWinds THWACK Survey

The next most telling result from the survey were the percentage of virtualized databases, with the number of respondents who had 100% of their databases virtualized at 25.1%. The results for the percentage of virtualized database instances is as follows:

• 100% of databases virtualized: 25.1%
• 76-99% virtualized: 27.8%
• 51-75% virtualized: 23.3%
• 25-50% virtualized: 20.6%
• 25% or less virtualized: 3.1%

The results of the SolarWinds THWACK survey are very close to the various industry estimates of 90%+ x86 server virtualization—most database instances run on virtual infrastructure.

Now, I must share the part of the survey I found disappointing, but in fairness this survey was available to all THWACK members. The next question was if the respondent was using SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) for performance management and monitoring of their virtualized databases.

Figure 3 - Percent of respondents using SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

I sneaked in one question that didn’t have anything to do with virtualization, but it was on my mind based on all the customers I’ve talked to. The question was around the DBA to database instance ratio, which seems to be growing. Having talked with a couple of customers whose DBA to instance ratio was 1:200 or more, I wanted to see what I could find from our THWACK community.

While the database to DBA ratio was less than 1:25 for 55.2% of the respondents, the ratio was astounding for the other 45%.

• 11.7% were responsible for 26 – 50 database instances
• 13% were responsible for 51 – 100 database instances
• 8.5% were responsible for 100 – 150 database instances
• 2.7% were responsible for 150 – 200 database instances
• 9% were responsible for 200 or more database instances

Summary

When it comes to application performance problems, all roads tend to lead to the Database Administrator (DBA). For wrong or right, “the database is the problem,” and the DBA has to quickly find the culprit to performance issues. Since many variables can affect database performance, from poorly written SQL and T-SQL to resource constraints, the addition of virtualization can make it more challenging for the DBA to find the root cause of performance degradation. The goal of this study was to validate that most database instances are run in virtual machines. I’d like to thank the hundreds of THWACK users who participated, and I look forward to everyone’s comments regarding this survey.