High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Software virtualization has been a major topic in the enterprise space for quite some time, but has become an important technology for embedded systems only in the last few years. The application of the technology to the enterprise space has been well described elsewhere by companies such as Citrix Systems, IBM VMware. The situation is less well defined for developers of embedded systems. Most importantly, the use of virtualization and its implementation in the form of a hypervisor in embedded systems are very different from enterprise applications. An effective implementation of an embedded hypervisor must deal with a number of issues specific to such applications. These issues include the highly integrated nature of embedded systems, the requirement for isolated functional blocks within the system to communicate rapidly, the need for real-time/deterministic performance, the resource-constrained target environment and the wide range of security and reliability requirements.