What Is a Hypervisor?

Harness the power of the cloud and virtual machines

Eric Kleppen
5 min readSep 17, 2022
Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

This article was originally written for BuiltIn.com. I recommend exploring builtIn.com if you’re trying to get a job in the tech industry.

What is a Hypervisor?

A hypervisor is a software layer running on a host machine that allows the host machine’s resources to be divided between virtual machines (VMs). Think of a hypervisor as software that can be installed on a server and used to separate the computer processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM) and network resources into separate VMs. A hypervisor allows multiple, logically isolated instances of applications like operating systems to run independently even though they rely on physically integrated hardware.

The increasing availability of affordable cloud computing is all possible through virtualization thanks to the proliferation of the hypervisor. Cloud computing has transformed into a multi-billion dollar industry over the past decade. Companies like IBM, Google and Amazon have invested millions into building massive data centers that host powerful computing resources, which they make available to consumers through products like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud.

How Does a Hypervisor Work?

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