Users Guide

Glossary 45
Glossary
CHILD PARTITION — Any partitian (VM) that is created by the root partition.
DEVICE VIRTUALIZATION — A mechanism that lets a hardware resource be abstracted
and shared among multiple consumers.
EMULATED DEVICE — A virtualized device that mimics an actual physical hardware
device so that guests can use the typical drivers for that hardware device.
ENLIGHTENMENT — An optimization to a guest operating system to make it aware of
VM environments and tune its behavior for VMs.
GUEST — Software that is running in a partition. It can be a full-featured operating
system or a small, special-purpose kernel. The hypervisor is "guest-agnostic."
HYPERVISOR — A layer of software that sits just above the hardware and below one or
more operating systems. Its primary job is to provide isolated execution environments
called partitions. Each partition has its own set of hardware resources (CPU, memory,
and devices). The hypervisor is responsible for controls and arbitrates access to the
underlying hardware.
ROOT PARTITION — A partition that is created first and owns all the resources that
the hypervisor does not own, including most devices and system memory. It hosts the
virtualization stack, and creates and manages the child partitions.
SYNTHETIC DEVICE — A virtualized device with no physical hardware analog so that
guests might need a driver (virtualization service client) to that synthetic device.
The driver can use VMBus to communicate with the virtualized device software in
the root partition.
VIRTUAL MACHINE (VM) — A virtual computer that is created by software emulation
and has the same characteristics as a physical computer.
VIRTUALIZATION STACK — A collection of software components in the root partition
that work together to support VMs. The virtualization stack works with and sits above
the hypervisor. It also provides management capabilities.
The terms and definitions listed here are from public Microsoft Hyper-V
documentation. They are considered to be industry-used terms for Hyper-V
environments. A complete list can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Perf_tun_srv.mspx