Is this similar in purpose/function to bhyve?
When it comes to the userland emulators, NVMM does not provide one. In other words, it does not re-implement a Qemu, a VirtualBox, a Bhyve (FreeBSD) or a VMD (OpenBSD). Rather, it provides a virtualization API via the libnvmm library, which allows to effortlessly add NVMM support in already existing emulators.