A hypervisor is software that creates, runs, and monitors virtual machines (VMs). The physical hardware that a hypervisor is running on is referred to as a host. The hypervisor shares the host’s resources — such as CPU, memory and storage — among various guest VMs. A hypervisor provides the flexibility to run virtual machines that use operating systems different from the one run by the host machine. For example, a hypervisor running on a machine that uses Windows can create VMs that run Linux-based operating systems, and vice versa.
Hypervisors have been integral to the development of cloud computing. Consider virtual private servers, which are an example of individual VM instances that have been virtualized and optimized by a hypervisor on a larger host machine within a cloud provider’s data center.
Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.
author
Technical Writer
Educator and writer committed to empowering our community by providing access to the knowledge and tools for making creative ideas into a reality
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
Become a contributor for community
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
DigitalOcean Documentation
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
Resources for startups and SMBs
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
The developer cloud
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Get started for free
Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*
*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.