Child partition definition
A child partition is a separate virtualized environment within a parent partition (which acts as the host). Child partitions allow for resource sharing while maintaining isolation between different virtual environments. Child partitions are primarily used to allocate resources to virtual machines running on the host system.
Whereas a parent partition (often called the hypervisor or the root partition) has direct access to the physical hardware, a child partition is a purely logical environment. However, it has its own operating system and operates almost as though it were a separate physical machine.
See also: host virtual machine, micro virtual machine, virtual device, virtual environment
How child partitions work
Each child partition is allocated a subset of the hardware resources from the parent, including CPU cycles, memory, storage, and I/O devices. Thanks to the virtualization software, each child operates in isolation from the other child and parent partitions, preventing a crash in one system from directly affecting the others.
For example, a hypervisor can create multiple child partitions with different operating systems (like Linux or Windows) on the same server. This setup allows users to efficiently utilize the resources of powerful hardware — instead of smaller individual machines for each user taking up space and consuming power, a few larger computers can perform multiple tasks and serve many people at once.
