A parent partition primarily provides a logically isolated space for executing the hypervisor's virtualization-specific processes. The parent partition has its own share of storage, memory and computing resources. Each instance of a Hyper V virtualization environment can have only one parent partition. It interfaces the primary hypervisor component stored in the root partition using the hypercall API to create one or more child partitions.

A parent partition is generally considered the root partition; however, parent partitions are logically distributed partitions for hypervisor-specific operations.