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Virtual Machine or Bare Metal: which is better for Containers?

Mohammed NaserMohammed Naser

Planning your cloud stack is among the crucial first steps to a successful infrastructure. Know what suits you best: containers on bare metal or virtual machines!

When architecting your cloud infrastructure, you have to decide how to deploy your tools and machines. We are here to help you plan your container strategy. Know about the benefits of deploying containers on virtual machines and bare metal to execute your cloud infrastructure better.

Scale Well With Containers Inside Virtual Machines

The deployment of containers inside virtual machines offers several advantages. If you are looking to isolate applications as effectively as possible, virtual machines are for you. Virtual machines also improve the portability of containers as their relocation between platforms becomes simple, unlike containers on just bare metal.

Let's not disregard the scalability offered by virtual machines. Containers on VMs are a lot more flexible, and if you are looking to maximize your cloud solution's scaling capacity, then containers inside virtual machines is the way forward.

Reduce Containerization Cost With Bare Metal

On the other hand, running containers on bare metal comes with plenty of benefits of its own. First, overhead usage like that of the host operating system or hypervisor along with the guest operating system, is eliminated. Additionally, bare metal as a base for containers helps cut deployment costs by not having to pay for a premium on hypervisors. Not to mention, containers on bare metal utilize system resources more efficiently. There is an economical use of memory, processing, and networking resources. So, if your number one concern is budgetary constraints, bare metal is the ideal base for your containers.

Kubernetes on Bare Metal

The use of Kubernetes as your container orchestration tool is going to make your cloud solution more financially viable than before. In terms of performance, running containers on bare metal gives significantly low latency when compared to the same on virtual machines. The CPU utilization on deploying containers on VMs can be much higher than that on bare metal.

But rolling back to snapshots on virtual machines is convenient, whereas it can be challenging with bare metal. Thus, it is not conclusive that Kubernetes on bare metal infrastructure is a one-size-fits-all solution.

So Which Way Should You Go?

In conclusion, IT organizations should be able to mix and match a resource to a workload depending upon their use case and cloud service needs. For example, a company in the financial industry would benefit from a bare-metal server due to its consistent enterprise-grade workloads and security requirements. Contrastingly, a retailer may be better suited for virtual machine servers to manage fluctuating traffic and control costs.

VEXXHOST's Kubernetes Enablement offering can deploy a fully-managed solution on your existing OpenStack private cloud. Consult our experts to know more about cloud infrastructure solutions including private cloud and find out what is best suited for your organization.

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