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Getting Started with Hyper-V
Unlike Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 Release 2, Hyper-V is a bare-metal server virtualization
product. This means that an operating system does not sit between the hardware and the
hypervisor (the code that does the server virtualization). The hypervisor (Hyper-V) is installed
directly on the server hardware. Even though Hyper-V can be deployed as a role on Windows
Server 2008, it actually sits beneath the Windows Server 2008 operating system. When Hyper-V
is enabled, Windows Server 2008 is known as the parent partition. It is more like a privileged
guest virtual machine in that respect.
The parent partition and the hypervisor are the only items that get direct access to the
underlying server hardware. The parent partition handles device drivers and some system
memory for the hypervisor. The hypervisor arbitrates access for the rest of the hardware and
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