Hi Jim!
Apologies for the delay in a reply to this post, I had somewhat of a family emergency that meant I was away unexpectedly - however I'm back now and wanted to drop a reply to you.
In terms of the support for VM, hopefully this gives a little clarity over the current situation:
We are currently working on projects to be able to offer visualization of FrogOS to customers. Please be aware that this is for FrogOS only and that we are yet to be in a position to commit to customers running Frog 3.0 being able to continue with Frog 3.0 running on the physical server and FrogOS on a VM.
The VM environments we support are limited to VMWare - FrogOS is currently supported on VMWare ESXi 4.1 U3 and later. Work is being conducted to ratify installation and support on the latest version of Microsoft's Hyper-V platform.
Regression and performance testing is scheduled to start later this year, with a target for beta delivery after September 2013.
While you stay on your current hardware, there's no additional costs for taking FrogOS and it's entirely optional, the new license fee covering your managed service is the £2,500 + £2 per pupil (with upper and lower caps) - so nothing changes there from what I've mentioned in the past.
Should VM become a possibility and be desirable to you, if work is required at our end to make this happen then it is likely there would be a charge for this. However, as you can see from the above we are too early in the process to have this nailed down yet - the thing I'd like to make clear is that a move away from your current hardware (especially now you've upgraded the RAM) will not be forced on you, this would be entirely your choice if you felt the benefits (and indeed any cost) were acceptable.
Thanks a lot - I'm always more than happy to discuss further and can always put you in touch directly with the guys that are looking at VM here if you wanted a little more info regarding the nuts and bolts.
All the best,
James Shackley
Head of Services - Frogtrade Ltd