There are two common approaches to virtualization – full virtualization and para-virtualization. Full virtualization provides complete abstraction between the hardware and the guest operating system. In this scenario, the guest operating system is provided a complete virtual physical environment in which to run and, as such, is unaware that it is running inside a virtual machine. One advantage of full virtualization is that the operating system does not need to be modified in order to run in a virtualized environment. This means that proprietary operating systems such as Windows can be run on Linux systems.

Disadvantages of full virtualization are that performance is slightly reduced as compared to para-virtualization, and some virtualization platforms, such as Xen, require CPUs with special virtualization support built in (such as Intel-VT and AMD-V).

via Installing and Configuring Fedora Xen Virtualization – Techotopia.