How does the hypervisor facilitate the operation of virtual machines?

The hypervisor facilitates the operation of virtual machines by allowing them to operate independently of physical hardware. This means that each virtual machine can run its own operating system and applications as if it were a separate physical computer, even though they all share the same underlying physical hardware resources provided by the host machine.

This independence is achieved because the hypervisor abstracts the physical hardware for the virtual machines. It allocates CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources to each virtual machine based on its requirements, while also managing the environment to ensure that the virtual machines can operate securely and efficiently. By doing this, users can run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single physical server, optimize resource utilization, and easily allocate or reallocate resources to different virtual machines as needed.

The nature of this independence is essential for flexibility in environments such as testing, development, or cloud computing, where running various configurations can be critical. This characteristic of hypervisors supports effective management and deployment of virtualized environments.