How Hardware Virtualisation Works?
Understanding how hardware virtualisation works starts with the hypervisor, or Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). This is the sole software layer that sits either directly on the physical server (Type 1/Bare-metal) or on a host OS (Type 2/Hosted). This software’s main role is to pool the virtualised physical resources and assign them dynamically to VMs.
Each VM, referred to as a guest, functions with its distinct OS and apps while being completely isolated from neighboring virtual machines on the same host.
Certain critical hardware components are CPUs with virtualisation extensions (Intel VT-x or AMD-V). These extensions allow the hypervisor to efficiently manage and trap certain privileged instructions from guest VMs, redirecting and escaping them so that several VMs are able to safely share the CPU.