Bare Metal Use Case – Virtualization

Bare Metal virtualization offers greater isolation and security for workloads while reducing overhead associated with traditional virtualization. This approach is increasingly being considered by organizations looking to optimize cost and performance in their IT environments.

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Bare metal virtualization, often referred to as “Type 1 hypervisor” virtualization, involves running virtual machines (VMs) directly on the hardware without a host operating system. The hypervisor itself is the primary control mechanism that interacts with the hardware, providing an environment to host multiple VMs, each running its own operating system. This is different from “hosted virtualization” (Type 2 hypervisor), where the virtualization layer runs on top of a host operating system.

According to Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle, there is an emerging trend of organizations reconsidering virtualization, with some moving back to running workloads directly on bare metal.

Bare Metal Virtualization or Running Off a Single OS

There are pros and cons to both approaches. Below are some of the benefits of either approach

Bare Metal Virtualization

Better Performance: The hypervisor runs directly on the hardware, so there’s minimal overhead compared to running VMs on top of an operating system. Also, resources can be more efficiently allocated to VMs, leading to better performance for applications running in those VMs.
Security and Stability related to Isolation: VMs are isolated from each other. If one VM is compromised, it typically doesn’t affect the others. Also, failures in one VM (e.g., crashes or faults) generally don’t impact others, increasing the overall stability of the system.
Flexibility and Scalability: You can run different operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc.) on the same hardware simultaneously, useful for testing, development, and production environments.
Centralized Management: Most bare metal virtualization solutions offer robust management tools, making it easier to monitor, manage, and automate tasks across multiple VMs.

Running Off a Single OS

Simplicity: Managing a single operating system is typically simpler, especially for smaller environments or less complex workloads. There’s no need to learn about virtualization platforms and hypervisors.
Cost-Effective: No need to purchase licenses for hypervisors or additional software for managing VMs. Also, since there’s no need for the overhead of virtualization, hardware can be simpler and less costly.
Direct Hardware Access: Applications have direct access to hardware resources, which can be beneficial for certain workloads that require high performance or low latency.
Simplicity in Troubleshooting: When something goes wrong, you only need to troubleshoot one operating system, making it simpler and faster to resolve issues.

The choice between bare metal virtualization and running everything on a single OS depends on your specific needs. Bare metal virtualization offers better flexibility, scalability, and isolation, making it ideal for environments that need to host multiple workloads or require robust security and resource management. On the other hand, running everything on a single OS can be simpler and more cost-effective, particularly for smaller environments or less critical workloads.

OpenMetal Bare Metal for Virtualization

Dedicated servers for virtualization typically have a large amount of RAM and then appropriate ratios of CPU and disk.

As a hosted private cloud provider OpenMetal stocks servers specifically for virtualization.

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Key features from OpenMetal that support easy virtualization:

20Gbps high performance private network (NIC: 2 X 10Gbps dedicated servers)
Dedicated servers with 128GB RAM, 256GB RAM, 512GB RAM, 1TB RAM, and 2TB RAM
Options for hyperconverged storage and standalone storage clusters
Networks preconfigured to handle virtual private networks that use VxLAN on top of VLANs
Rack aware provisioning system keeps servers in separate failure domains

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OpenMetal’s team has worked closer with us than any other infrastructure provider we have ever had. Their technology is great, but their superpower is a culture of aligning their team with our goals.

Chris Ueland, Co-Founder & CEO
@ Hunt Intelligence

OpenMetal Hardware for Virtualization

This is some of the enterprise bare metal hardware that can support virtualization. Reach out to our sales team if you have a specific hardware requirement that you don’t see in our bare metal catalog.

Discover the OpenMetal Large v3 Storage Server, featuring 12x18TB HDDs, customizable NVMe flash options up to 15.36TB per drive, and the Intel Xeon Silver 4314 processor. Ideal for Ceph-based clusters, it delivers scalable performance, hot-swappable flexibility, and enterprise-grade storage.

At OpenMetal, every bare metal server is deployed with dual high-speed 10Gbps uplinks, providing a critical layer of both performance scalability and fault tolerance. To fully leverage these redundant connections, OpenMetal configures these uplinks as a bonded logical interface using Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP).

At OpenMetal, we design our bare metal servers for high availability, ensuring resilience across private clouds and storage clusters. To protect the operating system from hardware failures, many servers feature dual boot drives in RAID 1, providing redundancy and seamless recovery.