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Is it possible to install a bare-metal hypervisor on a computer and run VMs created using that on the same computer?

what I'm going to achieve is like Installing a VMware workstation on a Microsoft Windows 10 and then Install a Microsoft Windows 7 in it, but this way the CPU and RAM will be used for no reason in the host operation system. I need to install the bare-metal hyper visor on the hardware level and then Install VMs in it, all of them on the same PC.

Type1 and Type 2 Hypervisors

if it's possible please recommend me some suitable programs for this matter and if not please explain why it's not possible. thanks in advance

Hennes
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Sam
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4 Answers4

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Sounds like you want to have a bare-metal hypervisor running, and let one of its VMs have control of the physical screen, mouse, and keyboard of that same system.

  • ESX doesn't do this. The best you can do is probably get to a maintenance shell which is not meant for everyday use.

  • Hyper-V does this.

  • You might be able to manually set up a Xen-based system to do this, but things like Xenserver, etc. are setup to run like ESX.

As far as why, keep in mind ESX and such are enterprise products.

  • IT support/people already remote into servers, therefore they will be remoting into the VMs as well. No one is typically at a datacenter working from a local console. Providing a console/display at the local system is not a priority and would only be done if a severe problem arose.

  • Businesses are interested in virtualization for the purpose mostly of moving physical systems to VMs - in order to reduce hardware costs. So ESX and such want to be as thin as possible to keep overhead as low as possible, to support hosting many systems at once.

LawrenceC
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You can do this with some limitations using ESXi. What you want is to assign specific hardware of the host to specific VM's for exclusive use. In particular, you will want GPU and USB controller passthrough. The limitations are in that you can't share hardware (with VM's running) and that you can, for example, only pass through certain GPU's via ESXi.

Check out this article for a similar setup and more specifics: Multi-headed VMWare Gaming Setup

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Alexandre G
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Actually the two type are no longer really distinctive these days:

However, the distinction between these two types is not necessarily clear. Linux's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and FreeBSD's bhyve are kernel modules that effectively convert the host operating system to a type-1 hypervisor. Nevertheless, since Linux distributions and FreeBSD are still general-purpose operating systems, with other applications competing for VM resources, KVM and bhyve can also be categorized as type-2 hypervisors.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor)

This is pretty much the same case for Hyper-V, which is available in the Windows 10 Pro or so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V#Architecture

Tom Yan
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Yes, that is possible. In fact that's why it is called "bare metal". This type of hypervisor has a tiny resource footprint and direct access to the hardware. Type 2 runs on a "normal" OS like Windows Server which has the disadvantage of more overhead (from the host OS). VMWare Workstation (or VirtualBox or QUEMU) would be Type 2. You are looking for VMWare ESXi (or XenServer or ...).

duenni
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