Database Instance Caging: A Simple Approach to Server Consolidation

The goal of server consolidation is to use servers more efficiently in order to minimize the number of servers, particularly under-utilized servers. Server consolidation is a common theme for today's database administrators. With the steady increase in processing power, dedicating a server to a single database instance often results in inefficient resource usage. When multiple database instances share a single server, they must share its CPU, memory, and I/O bandwidth. A dearth of any of these resources results in contention so that one resource-intensive database instance can significantly degrade the performance of the other instances. Today's market offers many tools for managing server resources, such as virtualization and O/S workload managers.