By Mark Hermeling
A good discussion on Virtualization Review on whether KVM is a Bare-Metal Hypervisor. A Bare-Metal hypervisor is also traditionally referred to as a Type 1 hypervisor, it is a hypervisor that runs directly on the hardware and that hosts guest operating systems. A type 2 hypervisor on the other hand is a hypervisor that runs within a host OS and that hosts guest OSes inside of it. Wikipedia has a decent explanation as well.
The easiest comparison is that a type 2 hypervisor is used by people running a different guest OS inside a host on their desktop. I am typing this on my MacBook Pro while a Wind River Linux kernel compile is churning away on a Red Hat Enterprise guest inside a VMWare Fusion session. This is clearly a type 2 hypervisor. The hypervisor in a type 2 environment uses the host operating system services to provide the virtual environments.
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