Which components are contained within a virtual machine?

Virtual machines utilize virtualized resources, which are abstractions of physical resources (NIC, RAM, disk, CPU), rather than directly containing the physical hardware components themselves.

Virtual machines are defined by configuration files (e.g., VMX for VMware, XML for KVM) that specify their virtual hardware, such as vCPUs, vRAM, and virtual disks, with these virtual components ultimately consuming and being supported by the host's underlying physical resources managed by the hypervisor.

Applications typically run *within* the guest operating system of a virtual machine, not directly on the hypervisor, which provides the virtualization layer.

While a virtual machine runs a guest OS and processes, and the hypervisor has its own processes, the virtual machine itself does not contain 'processes running on the Hypervisor'.