guest virtual machine (guest VM)

What is guest virtual machine?

A guest virtual machine (VM) is the software component of a VM, an independent instance of an operating system (OS), called a guest OS, and its associated software and information.

The guest VM and host VM are the two components that make up a VM. The guest VM functions as if it were a physical machine, and the host is the underlying hardware that provides computing resources to support it, such as processing power, memory, disks and network input/output (I/O).

A VM monitor (VMM) or hypervisor intermediates between the host and guest VM. By isolating individual guest VMs from each other, the VMM enables a host to support multiple guests running different OSes.

A guest VM is usually distributed across multiple hosts for load balancing.