Hypervisor

A hypervisor is software or firmware that creates and manages virtual machines by abstracting physical hardware resources. It enables multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single physical machine. Hypervisors are fundamental to virtualization and cloud computing.

Type 1

A Type 1 hypervisor, often referred to as a bare-metal hypervisor, runs directly on the physical hardware of the host machine rather than inside a conventional operating system.

Type 2

A Type 2 hypervisor, also called a hosted hypervisor, runs on top of an existing operating system such as Windows, Linux, or macOS. In this architecture the hypervisor functions as an ordinary application that relies on the host operating system to access hardware resources.

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