- VMware is a popular commercial application that abstracts Intel 80X86 hardware into isolated virtual machines. VMware runs as an application on a host OS such as Windows or Linux and allows this host system to concurrently run several different guest OSs as independent virtual machines.
- The architecture of such a system is shown in Fig. 17. In this scenario, Linux is running as the host OS; FreeBSD, Windows NT, and Windows XP are running as guest OSs.
- The virtualization layer is the heart of VMware, as it abstracts the physical hardware into isolated virtual machines running as guest OSs. Each virtual machine has its own virtual CPU, memory, disk drives, network interfaces, and so forth.
Figure 17:
VMware architecture.
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Cem Ozdogan
2010-02-19
![\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{figures/01-53}](img17.png)