Which hypervisor to use

They are not any different from the other applications you have in your operating system. Hosted hypervisors essentially also act as management consoles for virtual machines, you can perform any task using the built-in functionalities.

There is no need to install separate software on another machine to create and maintain your virtual environment. You simply install and run a type 2 hypervisor as you would any other application within your OS. With it, you can create snapshots or clone your virtual machines, import or export appliances, etc. Bare-metal hypervisors can dynamically allocate available resources depending on the current needs of a particular VM.

A type 2 hypervisor occupies whatever you allocate to a virtual machine. Creating another VM with 8GB of ram would bring down your system. This is critical to keep in mind, so as to avoid over-allocating resources and crashing the host machine. It is possible to use one physical machine to run multiple instances with different operating systems to test how an application behaves in each environment or to create a specific network environment.

You only need to make sure that there are enough physical resources to keep both the host and the virtual machines running. As is the case with bare-metal hypervisors, you can choose between numerous vendors and products. Conveniently, many type 2 hypervisors are free in their basic versions and provide sufficient functionalities. Some even provide advanced features and performance boosts when you install add-on packages, free of charge. We will mention a few of the most used hosted hypervisors:.

A free but stable product with enough features for personal use and most use cases for smaller businesses. VirtualBox is not resource demanding, and it has proven to be a good solution for both desktop and server virtualization.

It provides support for guest multiprocessing with up to 32 vCPUs per virtual machine, PXE Network boot, snapshot trees, and much more. It is full of advanced features and has seamless integration with vSphere.

This allows you to move your apps between desktop and cloud environments. It does come with a price tag, as there is no free version. This is the basic version of the hypervisor suitable for small sandbox environments. It comes with somewhat fewer features, but also carries a smaller price tag.

It only supports Windows 7 as a host machine and Windows OS on guest machines. Virtual PC is completely free. A competitor to VMware Fusion. It is primarily intended for MacOS users and offers plenty of features depending on the version you purchase. Choosing the right type of hypervisor strictly depends on your individual needs. The first thing you need to keep in mind is the size of the virtual environment you intend to run.

For personal use and smaller deployments, you can go for one of the type 2 hypervisors. If budget is not an issue, VMware will provide every feature you need. Otherwise, Oracle VM VirtualBox is a hypervisor that will provide most of the functionalities generally needed.

Even though type 1 hypervisors are the way to go, you do need to take into consideration many factors before making a decision. The critical factor is usually the licensing cost. This is where you need to pay extra attention since licensing may be per server, per CPU or sometimes even per core. While Hyper-V was falling behind a few years ago, it has now become a valid choice, even for larger deployments. The same argument can be made for KVM. Many vendors offer multiple products and layers of licenses to accommodate any organization.

You may want to create a list of the requirements. Such as, how many VMs you need, maximum allowed resources per VM, nodes per cluster, specific functionalities, and then check which of these products best fits your needs. Note: trial periods can be very useful when testing for which hypervisor to choose.

This article has explained what a hypervisor is and the types of hypervisors type 1 and type 2 you can use. It has cloud support, which includes Openstack and Cloudstack, among others.

Xen has been used in the virtualization of a wide array of guest OS. It has an interesting way of functioning, it has a kernel module kvm. With this, the VMs gain direct access to the hardware. It also comes with kernels, which are processor-specific such as kvm-amd.

Microsoft is not quite known to launch open-source software, but it introduced Hyper-V as an evaluation product which is available to download free of cost. The main aim was to launch their open-source hypervisor in competition to the others in the market.

The free Hyper-V server is a standalone software and comes with all the features which Microsoft had included in its Windows Server VMware, the name synonymous with proprietary products and definitely not free has provided its premium hypervisor product VMware ESXi to be downloaded for free.

It has a hack, though. If you want to use the full feature enabled version, you can do so for 60 days if the serial number is not entered. Lguest is a lightweight hypervisor that is built into the Linux kernel version 2. Although it was removed in version 4. But it is a good option to develop and test the kernel boot. Its functioning is quite interesting. It is compatible with both x86 and x64 OS, and it is quite portable.

It allows virtual machines to be imported or exported using the Open Virtualization Format OVF , which is a standout feature of this product. Its code is highly can be ported with ease to most 32 and bit architectures till the time they have PMMU and a port for the GCC compiler.

This type 2 open-source hypervisor is what every enterprise needs. It is simple to use with a very practical and easy to use UI. It is ideal for running and evaluating OS and applications on a virtual machine on Linux and Windows. It is an enterprise approach that is an open-source container-based virtualization platform created for Linux. OpenVZ has the ability to create many virtual machines in a Linux container. Thus, the admin is able to use each of these containers as individual servers.

They can reboot independently of each other on the same physical server. It is an open-source hypervisor based on the Unix operating system. Basically, software installed on an operating system. Hypervisor asks the operating system to make hardware calls. Hosted hypervisors are often found on endpoints like PCs.

The type-2 hypervisor is are very useful for engineers, security analyst for checking malware, or malicious source code and newly developed applications. These hypervisors usually come with additional useful features for guest machine.

Such tools enhance the coordination between the host machine and guest machine. Cons: Here there is no direct access to the physical hardware resources so the efficiency of these hypervisors lags in performance as compared to the type-1 hypervisors, and potential security risks are also there an attacker can compromise the security weakness if there is access to the host operating system so he can also access the guest operating system.

One of the best ways to determine which hypervisor meets your needs is to compare their performance metrics. These include CPU overhead, amount of maximum host and guest memory, and support for virtual processors. The following factors should be examined before choosing a suitable hypervisor:. Skip to content. Change Language.