A hypervisor enables the sharing of common underlying physical hardware between different applications. The hypervisor will also reduce an application's dependency on a specific physical server by abstracting the hardware into virtualized instantiations. This allows various operating systems and middleware to be installed on the same physical server while maintaining isolation regarding the use of resources such as central processing units (CPUs), memory, disk storage, and networking.
Also known as a virtual machine monitor (VMM), the hypervisor may be software, firmware, or hardware. The hypervisor manages requests ...