What Is Bare Metal Environment?

A bare-metal environment is like a big, fancy sandwich. You could get one with the standard tomato, lettuce and meat combo, but you know what's better? When it's all in the same bite: the tomato sauce is mixed into the bread, the lettuce is hidden underneath your cheese (yes, there's cheese under there) and the meat… well, it's everywhere. The whole thing is just amazing. A bare-metal environment is like that sandwich because it has everything you need—and nothing you don't. A bare-metal virtualization environment is one in which the virtualization hypervisor runs directly from the hardware, eliminating the need for a functional host system by directly interfacing with the underlying hardware to accomplish virtual machine-specific tasks. A tier-1 environment is also known as a bare-metal environment. Bare metal is the stuff of legends. It's where you can find yourself if you're not careful. But what does it mean in a computing context? Bare metal is a term that refers to a computer without any other operating system installed on it. In this sense, "bare" means "naked," or in other words, just the hardware itself without any software layers or other components that might get in your way. There are two basic types of bare-metal environments: virtualized and non-virtualized. A non-virtualized bare metal environment is like having an entire computer to yourself, with no host OS or guest OSes running on top of it; it's just you and your computer, no one else allowed inside. You have complete control over everything from memory allocation and processing power to hard drive storage space—everything! A virtualized bare metal environment is similar but with one crucial difference: there are still multiple virtual machines running simultaneously on one physical server (or even numerous physical servers). Each VM has its guest OS and shares resources with other VMs running on the same host machine (such as memory allocation).