A child partition is primarily a logical storage on a physical host machine that is entirely dedicated to a virtual machine. Each new virtual machine is provided with a separate child partition that is logically isolated from the rest of the virtual machines and their partitions. The child partition is used to install the guest operating system for that virtual machine and store data and applications like a typical hard drive partition. A child partition can't access the hardware resources directly, but is allocated its own quota of computing and memory resources by the hypervisor. The entire child partition is created and managed by the root or parent partition that runs the actual hypervisor.