To use virtual machines, we need software called a hypervisor. A hypervisor manages resources between the host machine and the virtual machines, provides access to disks, and has an interface to manage it all. There are two different types of hypervisors: type-1 and type-2. Type-1 hypervisors are the so-called bare-metal hypervisors. These are installed instead of a regular operating system such as Linux, macOS, or Windows, directly on the hardware. These types of hypervisors are used for corporate servers, cloud services, and so on. For this book, we will use a type-2 hypervisor (also called hosted hypervisors): these are installed within another operating system, as a piece of software not much different than, for example, a browser.
There are many type-2 hypervisors. The most popular choices at the time of writing are VirtualBox, VMware workstation player...
