From here, you can install applications and services (e.g. This is the abstraction of hardware I referred to earlier. The operating systems use these "virtual" resources just as they would physical resources. ESXi provides virtual compute, storage, and memory to the operating systems. For example, with ESXi installed, you could run Windows Server 2016, CentOS 7.6, and Ubuntu 18.04 on the same hardware. Once you install a bare metal hypervisor, you can then install multiple "traditional" operating systems on top of it. The physical box is often called "bare metal" and Type 1 hypervisors are often called "bare metal hypervisors." Common examples of bare metal hypervisors are VMware's ESXi, KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), and Microsoft's HyperV. With Type 1 virtualization, a lightweight operating system known as a hypervisor is installed on a physical computer or server. In professional production environments, you're much more likely to encounter Type 1 virtualization. VMware provides one of the more elegant virtual machine definitions when they describe a VM as "a software computer." There are two basic ways to run virtual machines: using "Type 1" virtualization or "Type 2" virtualization.