A method of performing a translation from a guest virtual address to a host physical address in a virtual machine environment includes receiving a guest virtual address from a host computer executing a guest virtual machine program and using the hardware oriented method of the host CPU to determine the guest physical address. A second level address translation to a host physical address is then performed. In one embodiment, a multiple tier tree is traversed which translates the guest physical address into a host physical address. In another embodiment, the second level of address translation is performed by employing a hash function of the guest physical address and a reference to a hash table. One aspect of the invention is the incorporation of access overrides associated with the host physical address which can control the access permissions of the host memory.