Hypervisor meaning

In legal practice, a hypervisor (also called a virtual machine monitor or VMM) is the software or firmware layer that creates, runs and manages multiple virtual machines on a single physical host, allocating CPU, memory, storage and network resources to each and enforcing isolation between them. The term is descriptive, not defined in UK or Irish legislation or case law, and is used consistently across England & Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland in IT, cloud and outsourcing contracts. Key features relevant to contracts and due diligence include: Type 1 (bare‑metal) and Type 2 (hosted) deployments; multi‑tenant segregation; live migration; snapshots; high availability; over‑commitment; and resource metering. Typical legal issues concern security obligations (including prevention of “hypervisor escape”, patching and vulnerability management), service levels for performance and availability, disaster recovery/business continuity, audit and penetration testing constraints, and exit/portability (VM formats and tooling). In data protection contexts (UK GDPR and EU GDPR as applied in Ireland), the hypervisor’s role in tenant isolation, access controls and logging is relevant to controller/processor security measures. Licensing considerations may include host and guest OS licensing, bring‑your‑own‑licence, open‑source components and third‑party consents for virtualised use.