Which of the following is a Type 1 hypervisor?

• A. VMware Workstation
• B. Oracle VM VirtualBox
• C. VMware ESXi
• D. Microsoft Hyper-V

Answer: (C)

Type 1 hypervisors run directly on the server hardware, with no general-purpose operating system in between. They boot onto the bare metal and then provide the virtualization layer that directly controls CPU, memory, storage, and networking for the virtual machines.

VMware ESXi is a quintessential example of this approach: you install ESXi directly on the physical server, and it runs a thin hypervisor kernel that manages all VMs. There’s no host OS to contend with, which is why it’s categorized as Type 1 and is ideal for data-center deployments.

The other options are different because they run inside a host operating system. VMware Workstation and Oracle VM VirtualBox operate as applications on top of Windows, Linux, or macOS, making them Type 2 hypervisors. Hyper-V sits in Windows environments as a server role, and when used that way it’s also a bare-metal style hypervisor, but in the context of this question, the clear Type 1 example is ESXi.