Re: Target audience?
I do not think there would be much of a virtualisation overhead, since the technology does not virtualize a machine, only an OS. As you move up the abstraction layers, the optimization opportunities are more obvious. In other words, it is system calls which are virtualized now, not the CPU. For majority of Windows APIs there is a very simple relation to Linux system calls (especially if you control also the application code, i.e. SQL Server itself). This means a wrapper will add very little overhead. This also includes IO (at least with the most popular options, including asynchronous IO) which is the largest source of virtualization overhead and coincidentally also major source of database performance issues (next to CPU cost of running queries). Also, Microsoft is obviously aiming this as competition to Oracle on Linux, so they cannot really afford large overhead.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
