compute

What is virtualization

Justin Hagen
June 16, 2023
| 2 min read
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Virtualization enables the hardware resources of a single computer—processors, memory, storage and more—to be divided into multiple virtual computers, called virtual machines (VMs).

Unlike traditional cloud computing, which is based on virtual machines, bare metal servers do not come with a hypervisor pre installed an give the user complete control over their server infrastructure.

Benefits of a Bare Metal Server
  • Access to physical servers
  • No virtualization layer
  • Single tenant environments
  • Large compute loads
  • High speed networking
  • Full server control
  • Dedicated performance
  • Zero shared resources
Bare metal servers vs. virtual servers

Today, available compute options for cloud services go beyond just bare metal and cloud servers. Containers are becoming a default infrastructure choice for many cloud-native applications. PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) has an important niche of the applications market for developers that don’t want to manage an OS or runtime environment. And serverless computing is emerging as the model of choice for cloud purists.

But the comparison most users still gravitate toward when evaluating dedicated or bare metal servers is the comparison to virtual servers, and for most companies, the criteria for choice are application- or workload-specific. It is extremely common for a company to use a mix of dedicated/bare metal and virtualized resources across their cloud environment.

Virtual servers are the more common model of cloud compute because they offer greater resource density, faster provisioning times, and the ability to scale up and down quickly as needs dictate. But dedicated or bare metal servers are the right fit for a few primary use cases that take advantage of the combination of attributes centered around dedicated resources, greater processing power, and more consistent disk and network I/O performance:

  • Performance-centric app and data workloads: The complete access and control over hardware resources makes bare metal a good match for workloads such as HPC, big data, high-performance databases as well as gaming and finance workloads.
  • Apps with complex security or regulatory requirements: The combination of a global data center footprint with physical resource separation has helped many organizations adopt cloud while simultaneously meeting complex security and regulatory demands.
  • Large, steady-state workloads: For applications such as ERP, CRM, or SCM that have a relatively stable set of ongoing, resource demands, bare metal can also be a good fit.