Bare metal or hypervisor? Advocates of each side bring up various merits of both. Is there a finite solution? Here's a brief outlook.
Bare metal or hypervisor? Which of these infrastructure models will give your business the best results? The server and cloud computing industry has been debating this topic on and off for the past few years. Advocates of each side bring up various advantages and disadvantages of both to relay their point across. Is there a finite solution? Let us examine.
Overview of Bare Metal
Bare metal servers are computer servers dedicated to a single tenant. Unlike traditional server infrastructures, bare metal comes without any additional virtualization/hypervisor layers. In such environments, although the customer rents the server from an infrastructure provider, decisions regarding how they are used lie with the customer, including OS installations.
Bare metal infrastructure comes with benefits such as complete infrastructure control, dedicated resources, customizability, cost-effectiveness, optimal security, and a stable environment.
Overview of Hypervisors
A hypervisor is a software that creates and runs VMs. With a hypervisor, one host computer can support multiple guest VMs. This support is possible by sharing virtual resources such as processing, memory, and storage.
Hypervisors come with many benefits to customers, such as scalability, optimal use of physical resources, better resource allocation, easier setup, management, and compatibility.
Comparing Bare Metal and Hypervisor
A hypervisor allows for the instant creation of virtual machines (VMs) and provides more resources necessary for dynamic workloads. This property is seen as an advantage over bare metal, where new physical server setups are not as easy to procure. Another advantage is that hypervisors can run several VMs simultaneously on the same physical machine, leading to more cost-efficiency compared to underused physical servers often running on a single operating system.
However, not every company needs virtualization or multiple VMs. For many users, smaller machines with a single operating system are more efficient and ideal in taking care of their business. The additional hypervisor layer will hinder them from accessing the full potential of the bare metal server within and thereby affect the overall performance of the infrastructure. There is also the factor of the simplicity of management, where the user doesn't need to take care of layers or multiple VMs. Edge computing environments can be seen as an example of such a model.
Overall, whether bare metal or hypervisor is the right solution for your business depends on the nature and size of your business. Container infrastructure is definitely on the rise and both of these models can use the technology to advance operational efficiency and objectives for companies. Be careful of adopting either of them just for the sake of having them or because one of them is an industry trend - then, it is just a waste of your resources.
VEXXHOST Cloud Services
At VEXXHOST, we provide close to limitless possibilities in creating and managing cloud environments, with three foundational infrastructure components - bare metal, virtual machines, and Kubernetes - often all in one environment.
For many of our clients, our OpenStack-based public and private clouds are the preferred choices because of their highly scalable and secure nature. Speaking of private clouds, you can now run on a fully agile and customized cloud from VEXXHOST, with no licensing fees and smooth 2-week migration. In fact, we're ready to put our money where our mouth is. We're so confident in being able to save you at least 20% or more on your current cloud infrastructure expenditure that if proven wrong- we'll give you $1,000 credit to our public cloud.
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