Mastering Microsoft® Virtualization

1.4. Hyper-V Architecture

If you really want to understand how a product works, it is often helpful to understand the architecture of that product. And understanding the architecture is easier if regularly used terms are defined.

Hypervisor

We like the definition of hypervisor that Microsoft uses in its device driver kit on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb969710.aspx).

"The hypervisor is a layer of software that runs above the physical hardware and below one or more operating systems. The hypervisor's main purpose is to provide isolated execution environments called partitions. The hypervisor provides each partition with the partition's own set of hardware resources (for example, memory, devices, and CPU cycles). The hypervisor ...