Sunday, November 20, 2011

Virtualizing MySQL - The Next Big Step

MySQL is continuing to be a big player in hosting and cloud companies.  Two of MySQL's great features are how light weight it is and it's speed.  This gives MySQL a lot of advantages over other database vendors.  Yet it is also a disadvantage because the other larger database vendors have more infrastructure and tooling that can impact MySQL being chosen as a long term enterprise solution.

This is where the virtualization of MySQL makes so much sense. The features and benefits of virtualization combined with the speed and light footprint of MySQL provides an enterprise database that is an incredible database solution.  Virtualization gives MySQL the following advantages:
 - A common and consistent x86 container that can move from HP, Dell, IBM and any other x86 hardware transparently.
 - Ability to move a MySQL database server in a VM to another physical host with zero down time.
 - If the host the MySQL database server is on crashes, the VM running the MySQL environment will immediately start up on another host.
 - Capability to move the storage for a MySQL database server to another storage platform with zero down time.
 - A failover mirror solution if only one virtual CPU is required.
 - Very fast provisioning and cloning capability.

Virtualizing MySQL adds tremendous agility, availability, elasticity and robustness to all the benefits of the MySQL database platform.  Anyone looking at using MySQL should be using a virtual machine as the default platform for MySQL.