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Knowledge Base
How Virtual Machines Work: The Power of Virtualization
TOPICS
How Virtual Machines Work: The Power of Virtualization
Common Use Cases for Nexqloud VMs
The Nexqloud Advantage: Cloud VMs (IaaS)
Your Flexible Compute Foundation
VMs vs. Containers: Choosing the Right Tool
Knowledge Base
How Virtual Machines Work: The Power of Virtualization

How Virtual Machines Work: The Power of Virtualization

The magic behind VMs is the hypervisor, a specialized software layer that runs directly on the physical host server. The hypervisor's job is to abstract the server's physical resources—processors, RAM, storage—and allocate them to multiple, isolated virtual environments.

  • The Host: The physical server that provides the underlying compute, memory, and storage resources.‍
  • The Hypervisor: The software that creates and runs the VMs (guests) by partitioning the host's resources.‍
  • The Guest: The virtual machine itself, which includes a guest operating system (e.g., Linux, Windows Server) and applications.

This abstraction allows you to run a Windows VM alongside a Linux VM on the same physical machine, with each operating completely independently and securely.