That's actually really interesting. I wanted at one point to run Joyent's SmartOS (http://smartos.org/) on a desktop, since it seems like I live my work-life in VMware anyways. I'd like to know what VMware's processor cost is, because I've definitely noticed it indirectly when trying to do the same thing both inside and outside the VM. Let's take my last example: a Python script which searches a large graph to find out how many paths there are with N edges or fewer. It turned out to save a couple hours of running time to install Python on Windows and then run on Windows than to run on Linux in the VM, and I may be wrong, but I don't think that the Windows version of Python is magically faster than the Linux one.

I also haven't figured out how to get VMware to let me do OpenCL stuff, which has occasionally been a headache when some library does exactly what I want to do, but does it with OpenCL. The hope would be that bare-metal hypervisors would be a little more transparent.

But yeah, 2% is great news. I don't even consider this a "win" against Xen necessarily; I think they're both showing that they're much more competitive than I thought they'd be.