What is a Hypervisor?

A hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM) is computer software, firmware, or hardware, that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called a host machine, and each virtual machine is called a guest machine.

Hypervisor is a virtualization platform. A hypervisor is a computer software,firmware or hardware that will create and run virtual machines. On a computer with hypervisor we can run one or more virtual machines is called host machine and the virtual machines are called guest machines.

There are two types of hypervisors:

Type 1: Delivered as an integral part of Operating System

Type 2: Delivered as a process that runs within an Operating System