I’ve been working on my senior thesis again and it has me thinking once more about virtualization. We’re starting to see what I think is the future of virtualization: pure-virtualized guests with para-virtualized drivers. The reason I expect this hybrid scheme to dominate is that it shares most of the strongest advantages of the two competing virtualization schemes. Loading the para-virtualized drivers allows the guests to exploit the performance advantages, without having to relinquish hardware compatibility. A scheme like this is being adopted by VMware, Xen, & KVM.
