[lmm]

>I don't fundamentally see the difference in deploying a runtime like the JVM over Mono.

It's not a fundamental difference, it's about being confident the tools and support you need will be available. With the JVM you've got the full weight of IBM and Oracle behind you, and thousands of vendors selling things like latency-optimized JVMs, heap analyzers, managed hosting services. Likewise with the CLR you've got MS and a whole ecosystem of companies building tools around their VM. With Mono I don't get the same level of confidence that I'm moving with the herd, that there are many other businesses who will have hit any possible problems, that I can hire people who've used the platform before...

But my tooling comment was mostly about the development tools. I'd be super-nervous about developing on one OS/VM and deploying to another; don't you find you hit VM bugs that weren't present when you tested?