What is Hyper-V?

Hyper-V also known as Viridian is a native hypervisor that can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems. Beginning with Windows 8, Hyper–V supersedes Windows Virtual PC as the hardware virtualization component of the client editions of Windows NT. A server computer running Hyper-V can be configured to expose individual virtual machines to one or more networks. Hyper-V was first released along Windows Server 2008 and became a staple of the Windows Server family ever since.

Hyper-V implements isolation of virtual machines in terms of a partition. A partition is a logical unit of isolation, supported by the hypervisor, in which each guest operating system executes. A hypervisor instance has to have at least one parent partition, running a supported version of Windows Server (2008 and later). The virtualization stack runs in the parent partition and has direct access to the hardware devices. The parent partition then creates the child partitions which host the guest OSs. A parent partition creates child partitions using the hypercall API, which is the application programming interface exposed by Hyper-V.