Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) uses a custom-designed hypervisor called “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute Virtualization.” This hypervisor, sometimes referred to as the “OCI hypervisor,” plays a critical role in managing virtualization and providing compute resources within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment. Here are some key aspects of the OCI hypervisor:

1. Purpose-Built for Cloud: The OCI hypervisor is purpose-built to meet the demands of cloud computing. It is optimized for performance, security, and scalability to deliver reliable virtualization services in a cloud environment.
2. Virtual Machine (VM) Management: The hypervisor is responsible for creating, managing, and running virtual machines (VMs) within OCI. It abstracts the underlying physical hardware and allows multiple VMs to share the same physical resources.
3. Isolation and Security: The OCI hypervisor ensures strong isolation between VMs to enhance security. It uses hardware-level virtualization features to isolate VMs from each other and the underlying host system.
4. Resource Management: The hypervisor controls the allocation of CPU, memory, storage, and network resources to VMs. It also provides features for dynamic resource allocation and scaling based on workload demands.
5. Support for Different Operating Systems: OCI’s hypervisor supports a variety of operating systems, allowing you to run a wide range of workloads, including both Windows and Linux-based VMs.
6. Performance Optimization: It includes features to optimize the performance of VMs, such as paravirtualization support and hardware acceleration for certain operations.
7. Integration with Other OCI Services: The OCI hypervisor is tightly integrated with other OCI services, such as block storage, networking, and identity management, to provide a seamless cloud computing experience.
8. Management and Monitoring: OCI offers tools and services for managing and monitoring VMs running on the hypervisor. This includes the OCI Console, APIs, and various monitoring and alerting options.
9. Live Migration: The hypervisor supports live migration of VMs, allowing them to be moved between physical hosts without downtime. This is useful for maintenance and load balancing.
10. Backup and Recovery: OCI provides backup and snapshot capabilities for VMs running on the hypervisor, allowing you to protect your workloads and data.
11. High Availability: The hypervisor is designed to provide high availability and redundancy for VMs. OCI’s architecture includes multiple availability domains (ADs) to enhance availability and fault tolerance.