Bare Metal #
Unlike traditional cloud computing, which is based on virtual machines, bare metal servers do not come with a hypervisor preinstalled and give the user complete control over their server infrastructure.
With a bare metal server, because users get complete control over the physical machine, they have the flexibility to choose their operating system, avoid the noisy neighbor challenges of shared infrastructure, and finely tune hardware and software for specific, often data-intensive, workloads.
— IBM
Installing an OS on bare metal gives the benefit of greater resource allocation due to the lack of virtualization overhead, which is useful if you have a limited resource pool to begin with. It also offers more intimate control over your entire stack, including drive encryption. Virtualization solutions tend to lack this feature, as companies that rely on virtualization solutions generally don’t anticipate having physical access to their servers compromised.
Virtualization #
Full virtualization uses a hypervisor, a type of software that directly communicates with a physical server’s disk space and CPU. The hypervisor monitors the physical server’s resources and keeps each virtual server independent and unaware of the other virtual servers. It also relays resources from the physical server to the correct virtual server as it runs applications. The biggest limitation of using full virtualization is that a hypervisor has its own processing needs. This can slow down applications and impact server performance.
— IBM
Virtualization solutions, on the other hand, offer much greater flexibility. A hypervisor lets you quickly spin VMs up and down in a matter of seconds, which is excellent for testing and short‑term workloads. It also improves resource allocation by allowing you to share CPU, memory, and storage efficiently across many VMs, making it a particularly strong option for scalability. Because each server is a VM, backups and reliability also improve: you can take snapshots, perform image‑based backups, and restore or move VMs to new hardware quickly if something goes wrong.
I had never used a virtualized server workflow before, so I wanted to try it out.