Creating and Managing Virtual Machines - Getting Started with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization - page 65

Virtual machines
A virtual machine is a software implementation of a machine such as your physical hard-
ware that executes programs like a physical machine. It runs its own operating system and
allows you to host your application on it. Like physical hardware, the virtual machine uses
virtual devices such as virtual hard drives, CPUs, network adapters, memory, and other
hardware resources that are managed by a virtualization layer, in our case, KVM. KVM
translates all these virtual resource requests to the physical hardware where the virtual ma-
chine is hosted.