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The hypervisor is a crucial component of virtualization that enables multiple guest operating systems to share a host's hardware resources. It acts as an intermediary layer between the hardware and the guest operating systems, managing and allocating the hardware resources such as CPU, memory, and storage.

By creating a virtual environment, the hypervisor allows each guest OS to operate independently while utilizing the underlying physical resources efficiently. This means that the host machine can run several virtual machines concurrently, each with its own operating system and applications, without interfering with each other.

In contrast, a virtual machine is the result of the hypervisor's work; it is the actual instance of an operating system running in a virtualized environment. A container is another form of virtualization that isolates applications but does not provide the same full operating system virtualization that hypervisors do. Lastly, a virtual network refers to a network created using software-based resources, which is a separate concept from the core function of sharing hardware resources among guest operating systems.