
A ‘bare metal server’ is a single user physical server. The term is used today to distinguish it from modern forms of virtualization and cloud hosting.
baremetal dedicated servers not shared with other Host users. Each server can perform any amount of work for the client or can have multiple concurrent users all according to the hired server’s settings, but they are entirely dedicated to the client who is renting them. Unlike many servers in a data center, they are not being shared among multiple clients.
The term “bare metal” is used to describe IT environments where the operating system is installed directly on the hardware rather than a system layer hosting multiple virtualizations (VMs).
This model ensures more control for the server owner and lower latency in data access as it avoids processing steps via software layers. For performance and speed-sensitive applications, Bare Metal can bring gains over virtualized servers.
Bare Metal server Advantages:
Superior input/output processing of operations per second (IOPS)
Greater consistency with disks and network for the performance of Input/Output
Service performance that eliminates problems with multi-tenant servers
Enhanced physical and logical security
Custom installations of dedicated software and media
Customizable hardware configuration
Virtualizators such as VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V have versions optimized for installation on bare metal servers.
Structure of a bare metal server
The structure of a bare metal server depends on the user’s requirements but, in general, two scenarios can be distinguished: traditional bare metal servers and bare metal servers with a hypervisor.
Traditional bare metal servers: The traditional bare metal server is a classic dedicated server in which the user-managed operating system (OS), for example, Windows Server, Ubuntu, SUSE, Red Hat, Debian or CentOS, is installed on the hardware, so that all user applications run directly on the operating system. Traditional bare metal servers house both dedicated rental servers and business servers with their hosting.
Bare metal servers with hypervisor: In the cloud environment, bare metal servers are used in combination with a hypervisor, which is installed on the hardware (native hypervisor) and offers users an administration interface to manage virtual machines. User applications do not run directly on the hypervisor, but separately on virtualized guest operating systems. The most common hypervisors are KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine or kernel-based virtual machine), the native virtualization function of the Linux kernel, the Microsoft Hyper-V client, VMware vSphere or Citrix XenServer.