A hypervisor, also called a virtual machine manager, is a program that allows multiple operating
systems to share a single hardware host. Each operating system appears to have the host's processor,
memory,
and other resources all to itself. However, the hypervisor is actually controlling the host
processor and resources, allocating what is needed to each operating system in turn and making sure
that the guest operating systems (called virtual machines) cannot disrupt each other.
This was last updated in June 2005
Dig Deeper
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