Assuming you already know about hypervisors, what could be the Type-1 hypervisor? Type-1 hypervisors are also called ‘bare-metal’ hypervisors. This is so since there is no intermediate software like a host operating system between a hypervisor and hardware. This is a direct communication between hardware and hypervisor. The benefit of these is tremendous over Type-2 hypervisor.
Here are the lists of enterprise level Type-1 hypervisor you can dig into.
VMware vSphere / ESXi
This is basically the origin of bare metal hypervisor and they kept at it so good like no others. This is the industry leader and Tier-1 hypervisors. vSphere/ESXi is available in 5 commercial edition and one free edition. VMware is the market leading innovative mind which led to features like memory overcommitement, vMotion, Storage vMotion, Fault tolerance and more.
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
Hyper-V is one of the top Tier-1 hypervisors out there and extremely popular. It was first released along with Windows Server now has greatly extended and enhanced.
Xen/ Citrix Xenserver
Xen is type-1 purely bare-metal hypervisor. This is direct competitor of Microsoft Windows Server. Citrix utilize Xen in the commercial XenServer. Xen is open source projects with with huge community. Xen server is ranked one of the commercial Tier-1 hypervisor solution available from Citrix.
KVM
KVM stands for Kernel Based Virtual Machine. This is also an open source project out there. Maintained by large Linux based community since this is a Linux based type-1 hypervisor. KVM is widely supported by the Linux operating systems like Ubuntu, SUSE, Red Hat Enterprise etc.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEV)
This is a straight off commercial solution by the KVM type-1 hypervisor. RHEV utilizes a protocol called SPICE and VDSM, Virtual Desktop Server Manager, with a RHEL-based centralized management server which makes managing hypervisor and virtual machines super flexible and GUI based.
These are the top notch enterprise level Type-1 hypervisor out there that you can and should think of for your business. With a little more in-depth research you will know what each of them has to offer and which suits you the most.
Popular applications powered by virtualisation
Most powered up desktop applications like VMWare Workstation, Virtual Box – they still need to run on top of the single host operating system. Now, here is the catch! What if you could improve the overall performance of virtualisation by removing the host operating system as well? That would significantly give you the performance boost since nothing is controlling the hypervisors but the individual hypervisors themselves. Yes! This is done by another kind of hypervisor/OS combination called ‘bare-metal’ hypervisor.