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Do you allow KVM on a dedicated server?

The acronym KVM has 2 possible meanings and may refer to either a Kernel Virtual Machine, or a "Keyboard, Video, and mouse switch." The differences between these are as follows:

  1. A Kernel Virtual Machine is type of virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel that turns it into a hypervisor. Our dedicated servers are virtualized guests that are running under a KVM.
  2. A Keyboard, Video and Mouse Switch is a hardware device that allows a user to control multiple computers from one or more sets of keyboards, video monitors, and mice. These are found, not uncommonly, in data centers and are used to provide direct access to the server hardware. In the past some, data centers used this instead of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) which is a set of computer interface specifications for an autonomous computer subsystem that provides management and monitoring capabilities independently of the host system's CPU, firmware (BIOS or UEFI) and operating system. At present, HostGator admins have server level access via IPMI.

HostGator does not provide customer level access to the Kernel Virtual Machine on a server, a KVM switch interface to the server, or IPMI access to the server, and a KVM hypervisor is not permitted on HostGator dedicated servers.