Just as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization uses KVM, Citrix uses Xen in the commercial XenServer. The core hypervisor technology is free, but like VMware’s free ESXi, it has almost no advanced features. Hyper-V is available in both a free edition (with no GUI and no virtualization rights) and 4 commercial editions – Foundations (OEM only), Essentials, Standard, and Datacenter. It was first released with Windows Server, but now Hyper-V has been greatly enhanced with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. However, with XenServer and vSphere, Hyper-V is one of the top 3 Type-1 hypervisors. The Microsoft hypervisor, Hyper-V doesn’t offer many of the advanced features that VMware’s products provide. Their vSphere/ESXi product is available in a free edition and 5 commercial editions. VMware is the leader in the Type-1 hypervisors. There are some lower-cost bundles that VMware offers and they can make hypervisor technology more affordable for small infrastructures. These hypervisors offer advanced features and scalability, but require licensing, so the costs are higher. How type 1 and type 2 hypervisors differ Image Source: Type 1 hypervisors: 1. The hypervisor is a software that can virtualize the hardware resources. It most commonly uses the hypervisor for managing the resources for every virtual system. What virtualization means is creating more logical IT resources, called virtual systems, within one physical system. Virtualization is changing the mindset from physical to logical. Nevertheless, the hypervisor is what controls and allocates what portion of hardware resources each operating system should get, in order every one o them to get what they need and not to disrupt each other. That is the maximum hardware available to one operating system in the cloud. Each operating system could use all the hardware (processor, memory) if no other operating system is on.

it is the part (program) that enables multiple operating systems to share the same hardware.

It is the part of the private cloud that manages the virtual machines, i.e. If you know what a private cloud is and you know the infrastructure of it, you’ve probably heard about hypervisor.

Vmware vs virtualbox performance 2015