Demystifying Hypervisors: Unveiling Their Crucial Role in Virtualized Environments and Resource Allocation

The hypervisor, also known as the virtual machine monitor (VMM), plays a crucial role in a virtualized environment. Its role is to create, run, and manage multiple virtual machines on the same physical host. These virtual machines, known as guest operating systems (OS), share the physical resources of the host machine like the CPU, memory, disk input/output, and network resources. The hypervisor ensures exclusive access to system resources for these guest operating systems by implementing strict isolation policies. Here’s how this is achieved: 1. Resource Allocation: The hypervisor controls the physical resources and dictates which resources are used by which virtual machine at any given time. On demand, it will allocate or deallocate resources to different virtual machines. This ensures no two machines try to use the same resource at the same time, therefore avoiding conflicts. 2. Task Scheduling: The hypervisor closely manages the underlying hardware's task scheduling, allowing each guest operating system to believe it has exclusive access. The hypervisor assigns tasks from the guest operating systems to the physical CPU in an orderly manner, which effectively gives the impression of exclusive resource use. 3. Access Management: The hypervisor ensures that each guest operating system cannot access the data and operations of another. It does so by providing the right interface to each guest OS and managing the memory in such a way that no guest OS can cross over to the space designated for another. Therefore, by handling the allocation and management of resources and by properly isolating functions and data, the hypervisor allows multiple guest operating systems to coexist and operate efficiently on a single physical host without collision and ensuring security.