Virtualisation is all the rage today, however there are still a few cases where good old-fashioned Unix chroot is still applicable, and testing MySQL across multiple platforms and architectures is one of those cases.
At Oracle we do full automated package verification testing of our MySQL server binaries prior to release, which attempts to install the package, start the server, run some functionality testing, then uninstall. It is of course highly desirable that the testing environment this is performed in is as close to a clean install of the target operating system as possible, to avoid problems such as our packages depending upon some local changes or packages we may have installed which won’t be available on a customer system.
Given the large number of platforms and architectures that MySQL supports, going the virtualisation route would mean having to use many different products: VirtualBox for x86, zones for SPARC, qemu for …
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