What is Virtualization & Hypervisor?

Published by Paresh Pawar
on July 31, 2018

We all use Personal Computers single every day. Our computers have an Operating System on which we run our apps. If you have windows OS on your computer and you want a software which needs Linux to run on then what? You can get another computer which has Linux or formatting your windows machine and install Linux in it. In this situation we can use an awesome technology known as Virtualization.

Virtualization is the term used when we share certain resources on which a virtual machine can run and do its task while not being in the direct contact with the main resources. Again let's talk about our Linux Windows scenario, basically, we want to run Linux software on windows on the same computer without compromising the Windows OS. What we can do is use a piece of software called as hypervisor which can talk with our Windows OS and tell it to share some hardware resources like RAM, Processor, Hard drive and network for making a Virtual Machine where we can install and run Linux OS. By this way we can run windows and Linux at the same time without any compromise.

A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called a host machine, and each virtual machine is called as a guest machine. The Hypervisor running on host operating system manages the execution of guest systems.

There are two types of hypervisors Type 1 and Type 2

Type 1 hypervisors run directly on bare metal,

Type one hypervisor examples

  • VMware vSphere / ESXi
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Citrix XenServer
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) (based on open-source KVM)

Type 2 hypervisors installed as a software on a existing host Operating system.

For example

  • VMware Workstation / Player
  • Oracle VM Virtualbox

▪ In next post of our Linux 101 series we will install and use type two hypervisor so consider subscribing. As always links are in below if you want to learn more about each thing explained in this video. My name is Paresh and I will see you on the Internet [hak5 fan xD].

Article last updated: November 6, 2023

Category: cloud

Author

Paresh R Pawar

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