Virtualization let's you scale applications on multiple processors. This allows multiple nodes to run in parallel, giving you a performance gain. You might have 10 times as many instances of your application running. This is easy to set up, but might not be optimal speed wise. It works best if there are a small number of dependencies in your application.
The problem with this technique is that hardware is no longer getting exponential increases in power and capacity. Therefore you would be better off designing your applications for the multicore processors out there. Normally this means using a threading model which might be complicated. You can cheat a little by using a thread pool with a bunch of worker threads.
There is not usually a need to entirely rewrite your applications to make them support multicore. You got to put some synchronization. And you must make sure race conditions and deadlocks do not occur in your code. Model driven development can help with this task. Refactor your apps for multicore usage, and you will see a big gain in performance.
