What is a Hypervisor?
Search IT Operations, Tuesday, February 20th, 2024
A hypervisor is software that facilitates running multiple virtual machines (VMs) with their own operating systems on a single computer host's hardware.
The host machine and its physical hardware resources independently operate one or more VMs as guest operating systems. Multiple guest VMs share the system's physical compute resources, including processor cycles, memory space and network bandwidth.
Hypervisors are also known as virtual machine monitors. They can help consolidate space on a server or run multiple isolated applications on one server. Hypervisors are commonly managed using specialized software, such as VMware's vCenter, which manages vSphere environments.