What is the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical system, or multiple instances of one operating system and share underlying resources?

What is the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical system, or multiple instances of one operating system and share underlying resources?

• A. Containers
• B. Virtualization
• C. Cloud Carrier
• D. Cloud Broker

Answer: (B)

Running multiple operating systems on one physical machine, or creating several isolated instances of an OS that share the same hardware, is virtualization. A hypervisor sits between the hardware and the virtual machines, presenting each VM with its own virtual CPU, memory, disk, and network, so each can run its own OS and applications independently. This approach maximizes hardware utilization while providing isolation between virtual machines. There are two common forms: bare-metal hypervisors that run directly on hardware, and hosted hypervisors that run atop a host OS. Examples include VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KVM. By contrast, containers package applications with their dependencies and share the host OS kernel, which is lighter but does not provide separate OS instances. Cloud Carrier and Cloud Broker refer to cloud service roles, not the virtualization mechanism.

Running multiple operating systems on one physical machine, or creating several isolated instances of an OS that share the same hardware, is virtualization. A hypervisor sits between the hardware and the virtual machines, presenting each VM with its own virtual CPU, memory, disk, and network, so each can run its own OS and applications independently. This approach maximizes hardware utilization while providing isolation between virtual machines. There are two common forms: bare-metal hypervisors that run directly on hardware, and hosted hypervisors that run atop a host OS. Examples include VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KVM. By contrast, containers package applications with their dependencies and share the host OS kernel, which is lighter but does not provide separate OS instances. Cloud Carrier and Cloud Broker refer to cloud service roles, not the virtualization mechanism.