How the choice of Operating System can affect databases on a Virtual Machine

As databases grow in size, the need for optimizing databases is becoming a necessity. Choosing the right operating system to support your database becomes paramount to ensure that the database is fully utilized. Furthermore with the virtualization of operating systems becoming more commonplace, we find ourselves with more choices than we ever faced before. This paper demonstrates why the choice of operating system plays an integral part in deciding the right database for your system in a virtual environment. This paper contains an experiment which measured benchmark performance of a Database management system on various virtual operating systems. This experiment shows the effect a virtual operating system has on the database management system that runs upon it. These findings will help to promote future research into this area as well as provide a foundation on which future research can be based upon.