Different Types of Hypervisors

Overview

Broadly speaking, there are two types of Hypervisors. A hypervisor is software that manages VMs(Virtual Machines).

Types of Hypervisors

Type 1 Hypervisor
Type 2 Hypervisor

Type 1 Hypervisor(Bare-metal Virtualization)

Type 1 hypervisor runs directly and operate on the host computer’s hardware. Bare metal is the physical computer hardware, hence the name Bare metal virtualization. This is the mostly used in Server virtualization solutions in Data centers.

Examples of Type 1 Hypervisor are :

Citrix Xen Server
Microsoft Hyper-V server
VMWare ESX server etc.

Type 2 Hypervisor(Platform-Level Virtualization)

Type 2 Hypervisor is an application software that are installed on Host OS( Operating System). Type 2 hypervisors are also called as Hosted hypervisors. Type 2 hypervisors are installed on top of the Host operating system. This enables users to create multiple virtual machines.

The host operating controls the computer hardware on behalf of the Virtual Machine OS. ( Guest OS). This virtualization software is the mostly used in desktop virtualization solutions.

For example, we can install Type 2 Hypervisor on Windows 10 Host Operating system and run a Ubuntu Linux Guest Operating system. Here in this case, Windows runs on the physical computer and is the Host Operating system. Ubuntu Linux is the Virtual Machine.

Examples of Type 2 Hypervisor are: