Anatomy of a Linux hypervisor

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"Let's first spend a little time understanding why virtualization is important and the role that hypervisors play. (And for more information on both topics, see the Resources section.)

"Virtualization, in the context of this article, is the process of hiding the underlying physical hardware in a way that makes it transparently usable and shareable by multiple operating systems. This architecture is more popularly known as platform virtualization. In a typical layered architecture, the layer that provides for the platform virtualization is called the hypervisor (sometimes called the virtual machine monitor, or VMM). Each instance of a guest operating system is called a virtual machine (VM), because to these VMs, the hardware is virtualized to appear as dedicated to them. A simple illustration of this layered architecture is shown in Figure 1."

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