I’ve written previously about how VMWare ESX manages CPU and how to measure your“real” CPU consumption if you are running an database in such a VM. 

VMware is currently the most popular virtualization platform for Oracle database virtualization, but Oracle’s own Oracle Virtual Machine uses the open source Xen hypervisor, as does Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): which runs quite a few Oracle databases.    So Oracle databases – and many other interesting workloads – will often be found virtualized inside a Xen-based VM.

I recently discovered that there is an easy way to view CPU overhead inside a Xen VM, at least if you are running a paravirtulized linux kernel 2.6.11 or higher.