Post by Nancy Calliey with Texas Broadband Accelerators, Inc, Dallas Tx.

What is a Hypervisor

A hypervisor is a virtualization technique used to run multiple  operating systems on the device. While non-hypervisor virtualization techniques are used to run multiple operating systems on domestic computers and handheld devices, hypervisors are used exclusively on devices whose sole task is to run multiple guest operating systems for commercial or industrial purposes.

Hypervisors can find their application in gaming technologies, commercial servers, and malware systems. Hypervisors are effective at reducing system requirements by running simultaneous virtual systems on the same hardware and sharing the resources of that hardware.

How Hypervisors Work

Hypervisors mimick operating systems by running virtual operating systems as a single program instead of as individual system interfaces. This allows multiple operating systems to coexist on the same device without using additional system resources. Rather than storing different files on each operating system, all operating systems within a hypervisor are able to access the same files that are located on the primary operating system and are used for running specific programs that are only compatible with certain operating systems.

Applications

Hypervisors are used for a wide variety of applications. For example, hypervisors can be used in commercial applications in order to allow guest users to access an online collection of operating systems for testing purposes or for communication.

Likewise, hypervisors can be used to allow educational, industrial, and government servers to allow many different users to connect to the server from customized user accounts. Additionally, hypervisors can be used for malware purposes in order for a spyware or rootkit software to detect actions taken by the primary operating system, such as actions carried out by antivirus software, and effectively hide from them.

Advantages

Hypervisors have several advantages of other virtualization techniques. For example, hypervisors are able to run on commercial and industrial servers and can be used to run extremely large numbers of operating systems at the same time without using excess hardware resources. Hypervisors are also used in virtual networks in order to share physical system resources such as memory, storage media, and computational capacity.

Disadvantages

Although hypervisors are advantageous for many situations, they also have several disadvantages. For example, reliable hypervisor software can be expensive and difficult to find, although free versions of hypervisor software are available. Hypervisors also lack the capability of running virtual systems on domestic computers, although other virtualization techniques are widely used for this purpose.