How does this differ from any other software? Either you trust the author, or you don't. I assume you haven't reviewed your entire stack to prevent it from including evil code?
If you are running in Microsoft Azure you need two VM instances to get any form of availability SLAs. Microsoft can reboot/migrate single instances whenever they feel like it. With manual failover you would only have a few minute downtime if someone is there to trigger it. That honestly sounds like a crappy solution 2015..
Am I alone in thinking that emulating a physical machine, installing an operating system on that virtual physical machine and so on and end up with two operating systems running in parallel on the same physical machine which needs to be patched and maintained is not an elegant solution? After a while, every developer might have five machines which he need to keep patched and maintained.
Personally I just have VMware Workstation for this at home and VMWare ESX cluster at work.
If we limit the scoop to consumer computers, including Linux seems odd. At least in Sweden extremely few people are using Linux on their computers. Even with Macs it's less than 30%.
Can you clarify why big brands should switch to Linux for their consumer PCs considering that few consumers wants it?