This paper discusses a few areas in which microkernels and VMMs differ architecturally but in which VMMs seem to have gotten things right. The first of these areas is avoiding liability inversion, which happens to microkernels that rely on user-space components to continue execution instead of keeping individual VM failure isolated the way VMMs do.
The next area is making IPC performance irrelevant, which VMMs do by making communication between VMs look like device interactions instead of through IPC- and RPC-based interfaces. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for their mainstream adoption, is the treatment of operating systems. VMMs were designed to support existing OSes, avoiding the additional efforts required by microkernels to do so after the fact.
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