Virtualization

Comparison of platform virtual machines

Linux KVM

Xen

VMware ESX

vSphere

KVM vs Hyper-V vs Container Runtimes

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)

• Linux-native virtualization module.
• Turns the Linux kernel into a Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor.

Hyper-V

• Microsoft's hardware virtualization product.
• Provides Type 1 hypervisor capabilities on Windows.
• Used extensively in WSL2 to provide native Linux kernels on Windows.

Modern Container Runtime Engines (containerd, CRI-O)

• Not hypervisors. They use Linux cgroups and namespaces to isolate processes.
• They do not emulate hardware but rather share the host OS kernel.
• Much lighter and faster startup compared to full VMs.

Example

Review this cheatsheet and adapt the commands to your environment before execution.