

VMs are isolated from the rest of the system, and multiple VMs can exist on a single piece of hardware, like a server. The hypervisor treats compute resources-like CPU, memory, and storage-as a pool of resources that can easily be relocated between existing guests or to new virtual machines. The physical machines, equipped with a hypervisor such as Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), is called the host machine, host computer, host operating system, or simply host. The many VMs that use its resources are guest machines, guest computers, guest operating systems, or simply guests.

Software called a hypervisor separates the machine’s resources from the hardware and provisions them appropriately so they can be used by the VM. A virtual machine (VM) is a virtual environment that functions as a virtual computer system with its own CPU, memory, network interface, and storage, created on a physical hardware system (located off- or on-premises).
