About
A hypervisor is a piece of computer software, firmware or hardware that
- creates and runs virtual machines.
- VMs run on top of.
It's also known as:
- container driver
- container manager
- Virtual machine manager (VMM)
The hypervisors run on physical computers, referred to as the host machine whereas VM running on a hypervisor is often called a guest machine
List
- Docker daemon (Cross platform),
- QEMU (for VM creation),
- Hyperkit (macOS),
- Hyper-V (Microsoft Window),
- KVM (Linux),
- Parallels,
- Podman (Alternative to Docker),
- VirtualBox (Microsoft Windows Home),
- VMware Fusion/Workstation (all VMware based hypervisors)
- …
Runtime
They use a runtime to run the container
- Docker (Cross platform),
Type
hosted
A hosted virtualization hypervisor runs on the operating system of the host machine.
bare-metal
A bare-metal hypervisor runs from the host machine’s hardware. The hypervisor is the operating system of the host machine’s server.