Hypervisor

Software that creates and manages virtual machines (VMs) by allowing multiple operating systems to share a single physical server. Type 1 hypervisors (like VMware ESXi, KVM, Xen) run directly on hardware, while Type 2 hypervisors (like VirtualBox) run on top of an existing operating system. In cloud GPU computing, hypervisors enable GPU virtualization technologies like NVIDIA vGPU, allowing multiple VMs to share GPU resources. Understanding hypervisor overhead is important when comparing bare-metal vs. virtualized GPU performance.