Hypervisors
A hypervisor is a software layer or hardware system that allows multiple operating systems to run on a single physical machine by creating and managing virtual machines and even creating virtual network environments between them.
Each virtual machine operates as if it has independent hardware, even though they share the physical resources of the host system.
We can find two types of hypervisors:
Type I (Bare-metal)
Runs directly on the host’s hardware
Manages and controls hardware resources like CPU, memory, and storage, and allocates them to the virtual machines
No underlying operating system is required for it to operate
Commonly used in data centers and cloud environments due to its efficiency and performance
Some well-known are VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V
Type II (Hosted)
Software-defined, has another layer of abstraction between hardware and operative system
Runs on top of a host operating system and the virtual machines run above this hypervisor layer
The hypervisor relies on the host OS for managing hardware resources
Some well-known are VMware Workstation and Oracle VirtualBox
Commonly used for development, testing, or personal virtual machine setups
Last updated