A host swap hypervisor provides a high availability hypervisor for virtual machines on a physical host computer during a failure of a primary hypervisor on the physical host computer. The host swap hypervisor resides on the physical host computer that runs the primary hypervisor, and monitors failure indicators of the primary hypervisor. When the failure indicators exceed a threshold, the host swap hypervisor is then autonomically swapped to become the primary hypervisor on the physical host computer. The original primary hypervisor may then be re-initialized as the new host swap hypervisor.