Questions on Virtualization Support

Given that everybody these days seems to be talking about Parallels, VMWare, Xen, Zones, and so on, you are unlikely to be surprised by the fact that it’s a subject that we’re looking at pretty closely within RedMonk. Spurred by a briefing Cote and I took several weeks back, I’ve been more seriously evaluating an aspect of virtualization I haven’t seen discussed a great deal: support. I’ve had a couple of conversations on the topic, with more scheduled, and have for the past few days been sending out the questions below to a variety of ISVs & support providers (Covalent, IBM, MySQL, Sourcelabs, Sun, Zend and so on) to poll them on the subject.

Before I comment, and relay some of the responses received so far, I’m wondering if any of you that happen to work for ISVs would take the time to answer the questions below. There are no prize giveaways or anything, but given the inexorable march of virtualized approaches I think we’re all going to need answers to these questions sooner rather than later, and your participation will help ensure that we get them.

You may of course respond in whatever fashion you’re comfortable with; on the record is of course preferable, so that you can receive credit for your answers, but off the record and/or super secret NDA is fine as long as I can use the information with your firm/product name abstracted. As is RedMonk’s policy, we’ll respect whatever terms you require. Comments would be great, email if you’re not comfortable with that.

With that, the questions:

1. Do you support your product(s) running in supported operating systems
   running on top of the following types of virtualization platforms?
   1. Native virtualization (e.g. VMWare)
   2. Paravirtualization (e.g. Xen)
   3. Operating system-level virtualization (e.g. Solaris Containers, FreeBSD Jails)
2. Do you support your product(s) running in supported operating systems running on top of grid type environments (e.g. Amazon’s EC2, Sun’s network.com)?
3. Do you support your product(s) running within the context of a meta-operating system (e.g. 3Tera, which hosts a variety of “guest” operating systems within one “meta” operating system)?

Appreciate, as always, any input.