The founder of Virtual Iron, Alex Vasilevsky, wrote a post on the company weblog the other day called, "Paravirtualization is a Dead-End Approach." Without getting into an analysis of his post, the whole performance debate seems to be a very short term issue.

The longer term problem that must be solved is that any server virtualization approach leaves the enterprise with a more complex environment to manage. The real win from virtualization will come not from replicating overly complicated physical servers virtually but from the separation of the application from its underlying infrastructure.