Classification of Server Virtualization Architectures

Server virtualization is a crucial technology in cloud computing, broadly defined to include server, storage, network, and data‑center virtualization, aiming to abstract any form of resource into another form.

Hosted virtualization

In hosted virtualization, the virtualization management software runs as a regular application on a host operating system (Windows, Linux, etc.) and creates virtual machines that share the underlying server resources.

Bare‑metal virtualization

A hypervisor runs directly on physical hardware, handling CPU privileged instructions from virtual machines and managing VM queues, scheduling, and returning hardware processing results to the VMs.

Operating‑system level virtualization

Without a separate hypervisor layer, the host OS itself allocates hardware resources among multiple virtual servers, requiring all VMs to run the same OS kernel (e.g., Virtuozzo/OpenVZ/Docker).

Hybrid virtualization

Hybrid virtualization also uses a host OS but inserts a kernel‑level driver (Virtual Hardware Manager) that mediates hardware access between VMs and the OS, leveraging existing memory managers and CPU schedulers for improved performance.

Comparison of architectures

Bare‑metal and hybrid virtualization are seen as future trends; combined with hardware‑assisted virtualization they can achieve performance close to physical machines. Major solutions such as KVM, Hyper‑V, and VMware support hardware assistance.

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