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What is a Bare Metal Hypervisor and How Does it Work?

Bare Metal Hypervisor

Managing the hosting requirements for your applications and business operations demands careful server resource management.

If you’re a SaaS or PaaS business or have extensive geographically dispersed IT operations, you need robust hosting solutions that offer the best combination of performance, scalability, and customizability.

Bare-metal servers are often the best fit for mid-sized and enterprise-level applications. However, all the power of bare-metal servers comes at a cost – you need to configure them just right for optimized performance.

In this article, we’ll go through the basics of bare-metal servers and how a bare-metal hypervisor can help you better manage your bare-metal server and optimize workloads for your business applications. By answering the question, what is a bare-metal hypervisor, we’ll help you see how these solutions add value to your business operations.

Let’s start with the definitions.

What is a Bare-Metal Server

Bare metal servers are servers leased out to a single tenant. These are powerful solutions that bring dedicated resources to your projects. As a result, they are better suited to deal with resource-intensive workloads and traffic spikes that demand higher server performance than usual.

In addition to performance, bare-metal servers also ensure a higher degree of security from cyber-attacks because of the single tenancy ( that simplifies security for the entire server) and control over the hardware and software installed on the server (You can quickly vet these components for security loopholes).

Finally, bare-metal servers are a great fit for projects that require custom-built components and libraries. Since you have complete control over environment customization, you can select the components that go into each software and hardware architecture layer.

What is a Hypervisor

Hypervisor (aka virtual machine monitor or VMM) is software that builds and manages virtual machines on a bare-metal server. When deployed, a hypervisor enables a single bare-metal server to handle several virtual machines (VMs) by sharing the bare-metal server resources (CPU, RAM, Storage, and bandwidth) among the VMs.

Essentially, a hypervisor’s job is to translate requests between physical and virtual resources, thus allowing VMs to function as independent servers.

System admins often set up a hypervisor on a bare-metal server to deploy multiple apps and projects on a large server. This allows them to efficiently use server resources and allocate just the right share of these resources to the apps deployed on the VMs.

What is a Bare-Metal Hypervisor

A bare-metal hypervisor is also known as a Type 1 hypervisor. In practical terms, this is a virtualization tool installed directly on the server’s hardware. A Type 1 hypervisor sits between the operating system and the server’s hardware. This positioning allows a bare-metal hypervisor to manage multiple VM that have a customizable installation of an OS and application files.

Because they have direct access to server hardware, bare-metal hypervisors offer higher performance, scalability, and stability. This ensures high availability and excellent resource management for all the hosted VMs.

Bare-metal hypervisors are a popular solution where you need complete control over resource management and allocation, performance tweaking, and rapid deployment of custom stacks on VMs. Popular bare-metal hypervisor vendors include VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Choosing Between Hypervisor & Bare-metal Virtualization

Since hypervisor and bare-metal virtualization look very similar, choosing between the two can become a challenge for server management teams. Both options are great for using dedicated servers optimally without wasting resources or worrying about scalability and performance drops.

As a result, choosing one over another is a matter of how you view your virtualized architecture and what level of access and performance you require.

Hypervisor virtualization allows a more significant number of virtual machines to be run per physical server and provides a layer of abstraction between the hypervisor and the underlying hardware, making it easier to scale or move workloads from one server to another. You also get better app isolation in this architecture.

On the other hand, bare-metal virtualization provides more control over the architecture, with direct access to physical resources (such as storage and CPU), and can build better-optimized environments for hosting intensive workloads.

With all things being equal, a bare-metal hypervisor offers more control and flexibility in accessing and allocating server resources.

The Benefits Of Bare-Metal Hypervisor

Here’re some benefits of bare-metal hypervisors.

Enhanced Security

Since bare-metal hypervisors operate directly on the hardware layer and don’t need an OS, the infrastructure remains protected from OS-level vulnerabilities. In addition, these hypervisors ensure that each guest VM is logically isolated so that even if one VM gets compromised, the rest of the infrastructure remains protected.

Lower Latency and Increased Speed

By virtualizing the underlying hardware directly, bare-metal hypervisors offer lower latency and much faster response. This quick response speed proves valuable when you need to scale resources immediately as traffic spikes on the server.

Scalability and Fault Tolerance

Bare metal hypervisors are highly scalable and fault-tolerant because there’s no OS layer to introduce additional steps in processing the requests.

Better Hardware Utilization

Since bare-metal hypervisors have direct access to the hardware resources, they are an excellent solution to hardware utilization challenges. In addition, this simplifies and speeds up the on-demand distribution of hardware resources to the hosted virtual machines.

Conclusion

Bare-metal hypervisors offer many benefits, ensuring excellent resource management and simplified VM provisioning. For example, you create virtual machines instantly and automate allocating resources required for various variable workloads.

This allows you to get the most out of your bare-metal server and host multiple virtual machines, each for separate workloads. You can deploy any combination of OS and application files on a VM and then have multiple VM on a dedicated server.

Let us know how you use hypervisor solutions for bare-metal servers and experience the ease and versatility of a bare-metal server.

FAQs – Bare-Metal Hypervisor

1- What is a bare-metal hypervisor?

A bare-metal hypervisor, also known as a type 1 hypervisor, is a virtualization solution that runs directly on the hardware of a host machine to allow multiple guest operating systems to run on the same physical server.

2- How is a bare-metal hypervisor different from a hosted hypervisor?

A bare-metal hypervisor runs directly on the hardware of a host machine, whereas a hosted hypervisor runs on top of an existing operating system.

3- What are some popular bare-metal hypervisors?

Popular bare-metal hypervisors include VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Hypervisor, and KVM.

4- What are the benefits of using a bare-metal hypervisor?

Benefits of using a bare-metal hypervisor include increased hardware utilization, better performance, increased flexibility, and improved security.

5- What are some use cases for a bare-metal hypervisor?

Bare-metal hypervisors are commonly used in data centers and cloud environments, testing and development environments, and disaster recovery scenarios.

Pratik

Pratik Kshirsagar is a Linux system administrator at RedSwitches (A fully Customizable Dedicated Server Hosting platform). Besides his work life, he loves music and traveling. You can email him at [email protected]

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