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Hypervisor Overview PDF

There are two types of hypervisors: bare-metal/native hypervisors that run directly on hardware and hosted hypervisors that run on top of an existing operating system. Bare-metal hypervisors allow for the creation of virtual machines (VMs) with guest operating systems, while hosted hypervisors install like other programs and allow Windows, Linux, and OS X to serve as host or guest systems. The process of creating a VM is similar across most hypervisors with graphical interfaces to select options for the guest OS, hard drive size, memory allocation, and I/O devices.

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83 views

Hypervisor Overview PDF

There are two types of hypervisors: bare-metal/native hypervisors that run directly on hardware and hosted hypervisors that run on top of an existing operating system. Bare-metal hypervisors allow for the creation of virtual machines (VMs) with guest operating systems, while hosted hypervisors install like other programs and allow Windows, Linux, and OS X to serve as host or guest systems. The process of creating a VM is similar across most hypervisors with graphical interfaces to select options for the guest OS, hard drive size, memory allocation, and I/O devices.

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shamagondal
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© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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9/19/2018 Hypervisor overview

Hypervisors overview
This is a brief introduction to hypervisors -- software that allows the implementation of Virtual Machines (VM)
in a variety of different hardware, running different operating systems from the one that may exist in the
physical machine, like Windows, OS X, Linux, Unix, etc. The hypervisor can also be the basic operating system
that will host any other operating systems. IBM created the original hypervisor in 1965 to handle the emulation
of prior machines and switch between the then "new" IBM 360 and the emulated machines.

A basic introduction to hypervisors is found on Wikipedia. There are two types of hypervisors:

1. Bare-metal or native: it runs directly in the harware is is the host operating system that will allow VMs to
be created running guest operating systems. An example of this is type are the VMware vSphere
Hypervisor, Xen, and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.

2. Hosted: it runs on top of an existing operating system. The operating system of the machine is called the
host, while the operating systems that run in the VMs created by the hypervisor are called guest operating
systems. VMware workstation and Oracle VM Virtual Box are the examples of this type that we have seen
before and will see in class today running Ubuntu, Windows XP and OS X as guest OSs.

Installing hosted based hypervisors is like installing any program in the guest operating system. Windows, OS
X, Linux and UNIX can be used both as host and guest operating systems. In this article you can see an example
of Virtual Box running on Windows 7 and hosting a Linux distribution, and this other article you can see
VMware Workstation doing the same, just like we saw in class. Virtual Box is free, while VMWare Workstation
is not but can be used for a 3 to 30 days free trial period. The machines in the MIS Lab run on VMware
Workstations under UB licenses.

The process of creating a VM is similar in most hypervisors and use graphical interfaces to walk you through
your choices of guest OS, size of hard-drive, memory to allocate, I/O devices, etc. You may wish to see my
tutorial on how to create Ubuntu and Windows 8 VMs using the free VMware Player 5. There is another
VMWare tutorial on how to create a VM. Here is a Virtual Box Manual, and You-Tube videos of creating a VM
in Linux to host Windows 7, VM for Windows 2008 Server, and Windows 7 in OS X. There is another tutorial
on how to Install Virtual BOX in OS X, and then install Windows 8 at this Microsoft page.

A more delicated operation is to create a OS X VM in Windows. You should do this only for test and learning
purposes. Apple does not authorize you to install OS X in non Apple machines. You can do this in two ways:
acquire a copy of OS X and then install it either in VMware Workstation or Virtual Box -- this is a more
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9/19/2018 Hypervisor overview

"legitimate" way of doing it because you paid for the software. But, if you only want to do see OS X running in
Windows as a learning exercise on hypervisors you may use this article to install it in VMware Workstation or
Virtual Box.

This page is maintained by Al Bento who can be reached at [email protected]. This page was updated on March
26, 2014. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the
information provided.

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