Have you actually used any of the products you are talking about? You don't take the filesystem snapshots on the virtual machine, but of the disk image on the host, typically using LVM or something similar. What you want to do with this snapshot later on is up to you, normally people just export it to a remote location.
For total system failures you still need a proper backup solution on the machine. This is true even if it's dedicated hardware or a virtual machine.
You seem to always resort to talking about databases, and this might be true for huge centralized databases, but that is a pretty damn specific task. Also, I thought we were past the "put everything on one box"-model.
The complexity you talk about is just not there. It acts and feels just like a normal machine, and you have yet to provide any data that would support your claim, even for edge cases.
For total system failures you still need a proper backup solution on the machine. This is true even if it's dedicated hardware or a virtual machine.
You seem to always resort to talking about databases, and this might be true for huge centralized databases, but that is a pretty damn specific task. Also, I thought we were past the "put everything on one box"-model.
The complexity you talk about is just not there. It acts and feels just like a normal machine, and you have yet to provide any data that would support your claim, even for edge cases.
Something worth reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#Hardware_ass...