1) I'm not sure if this article has accounted for the one massive achilles heel of paravirtualization (containers):
Corrupting the core OS by way of upgrade or patches, can take all containers all out.
2) I have used VMware since the early betas in 98. The motivation was simple:
Replacing servers sucks.
The day you buy or lease a server, in essence, you purchase it's death and dealing with a hasty or painful migration.
3) From my 7th or so generation of server migrations in doing complex hosting since 95, one thing is clear:
The single most valuable thing is a hard separation between the bare metal and the OS.
So much so that you can move the VMs at will anywhere, because, you just bought the death of your server the day it's brand new. I ran a CentOS box with a BSD VM as a firewall, with Windows and Linux VM's behind it to serve one project because each did their unique and highly valuable part.
Ultimately, for me: Paravirtualization not only uses the host os, but shares it between multiple configurations. This is in my mind still introduces risks that should be minimized, if not avoided.
I'm sure PV is improving all the time. It's simply newer to the game than what VMware started. If VMWare isn't for you, suites like ProxMox are serious options to consider. Hosting isn't somewhere to have preferences and opinions. If I'm wrong, I'll change at any moment.
Issues with PV might be decreasing, but I've been ultimately burnt by PV every time I used it in production for a prolonged time.
An example of where sysadmin time cost way more than a little bit of more ram for Virtualization: Parallels Virtuozzo, corrupted itself so badly during an update to the core OS that all the containers on the server were rendered inoperable. Parallels support had one of their high level techs login from Russia to manually install corrupted DLL files so the server would at least boot, and we could get the heck off it. At the end of the repair we were told the VM was no longer upgradeable and all updates would have to be done manually.
The customer had taken on PV at the behest of the hosting company who insisted it was amazing despite my concerns. Said hosting company also now has switched over entirely to VMware.
The unforgivable kicker of PV for my customer: tons of customization and creating re-usable containers were all lost when leaving, because moving to something like VMware meant having to set them up from scratch again.