It involves CPUs that provide support for virtualization in hardware, and other hardware components that help improve the performance of a guest environment. Hardware-assisted virtualization is a way of improving overall efficiency of virtualization. Guest programs need to be specifically modified to run in this environment. Paravirtualization – The guest apps are executed in their own isolated domains, as if they are running on a separate system, but a hardware environment is not simulated.

Full virtualization – Almost complete simulation of the actual hardware to allow software environments, including a guest operating system and its apps, to run unmodified.

The software or firmware that creates a virtual machine on the host hardware is called a hypervisor or virtual machine monitor.ĭifferent types of hardware virtualization include: The words host and guest are used to distinguish the software that runs on the physical machine from the software that runs on the virtual machine. In hardware virtualization, the host machine is the machine that is used by the virtualization and the guest machine is the virtual machine. For example, a computer that is running Arch Linux may host a virtual machine that looks like a computer with the Microsoft Windows operating system Windows-based software can be run on the virtual machine. Software executed on these virtual machines is separated from the underlying hardware resources. Hardware virtualization or platform virtualization refers to the creation of a virtual machine that acts like a real computer with an operating system.

Virtual desktop manager