Hypervisors Vs Bare Metal Servers: a Beginner’s Guide
Introduction If you are an IT professional, you probably know that choosing the right hosting infrastructure can make or break your IT backbone. At one point in your career, you will have to make the decision whether to use hypervisors or bare metal servers. Both options will get the job done albeit differently. Each has its own unique characteristics that cater to different needs in the market. A good understanding of how both infrastructures operate places you and your company at a better position to deploy the right strategies as far as hosting is concerned. To help you make an informed decision, we have put together a guide that explains hypervisors and bare metal in detail including their features and associated pros and cons.
Table of Contents
What is Bare Metal
Features of Bare Metal.
What Is A Hypervisor
Features of Hypervisors.
Advantages of bare metal.
Disadvantages of Bare metal.
Advantages of hypervisors.
Disadvantages of Hypervisors.
What is Bare Metal? Bare metal refers to a physical server or tenant environment ideal for a single person or company. With this model, the owner of the metal server is virtually the only one with access to the server. Its working principle resembles that of a dedicated server where the operating system can be installed onto the physical server without the need for a hypervisor overhead. On top of its exemplary performance, bare metal has the ability to support varied operating systems, even hypervisors. Bare metal servers often find use in workloads that require a high amount of processing power and those that are latency sensitive. For this reason, these servers are excellent for projects that demand a continuous amount of resources. Bare metal servers have impressive speeds therefore utilized for workloads that need a fast turnaround. The actual term, “bare metal� is primarily used to create a distinction between a physically dedicated server emanating from a virtualized environment and the array of modern cloud hosting strategies. Within any given data center, bare metal servers are not shared among multiple clients.
Features of Bare Metal
Single tenant environment: Bare metal servers cater to one client and cannot be physically shared with other customers. This, of course, can change if the clients decided to run a separate virtualized environment apart from it resulting in the creation of a multi-tenant environment.
Security: When it comes to security, nothing comes close to dedicated single tenant servers. Since each server caters to one client, security breaches can only be witnessed if there was hacking.
High processing power: Compared to all solutions in the market, bare metal servers can handle more data.
Customization capabilities. As the sole owner of the server, you can play with all the customization options at your disposal. From the configuration stage, you can select the appropriate component including hardware resources, software, panel add-ons and so on. You can even throw in a hypervisor into the mix.
What Is A Hypervisor?
A hypervisor is an operating system with the ability to create virtual machines (VM) inside a bare metal infrastructure. With hypervisors, an operating system such as Ubuntu, Windows, or Debian is directly installed on the server after which apps run natively within the OS. When a hypervisor and a bare metal server are both installed on the OS, the user can play the role of a manager and create virtual machines on the server. The hypervisor’s purpose is not to run native applications but to virtualize workloads into isolated virtual machines. This concept allows for enhanced reliability and flexibility of virtualization. Hypervisors are fundamental components in the IT backbone because they make it possible for you to have a range of virtual machines all functioning optimally on one piece of computer hardware. Hypervisors were introduced in the 1960s but it wasn’t until the introduction of Unix and Linux that they surged in popularity. These two operating systems heavily utilized hypervisors to expand their hardware capabilities, improve reliability, control costs, and enhance security.
Features of Hypervisors
Uses virtual machines: Hypervisors use the virtualization technology of dividing bare metal servers into private servers (VPs)
Horizontal scalability: Ideal for situations that demand horizontal scalability and pure performance such as high-traffic websites and cloud software
Advanced Virtual Server Security: Include more features tailored to secure the system and the virtual machines. For instance, they have software acceptable features that guards against unsigned software finding residence in the system. They also have integrated firewalls that eliminate the need of IP tables and utilize set of rules to define every port of access. There are enhanced auditing and logging features that track every activity in the system in order to prevent malicious activities from being erased or hidden. What’s more, they also come with Active Directory Integration that authenticates users who are trying to aces the virtualized servers. The only thing that users need to know is the fact that all these security features may not benefit you that much if you don’t deploy and configure them according to the recommended or proper security guidelines.
Advantages of bare metal
As a single tenant server, bare metal resources belong to you alone. This means it can only cater to one client on the server. However, when one server is extremely overloaded with requests, system administrators can increase resources by adding hardware. A bare metal environment is ideal for a wide range of workloads particularly those that require access management and granular resource with an ability to scale and maintain high levels of security. There are several advantages that make bare metal one of the most preferred hosting infrastructure in the world of information technology. These include the following: ď ľ
Security and isolation: Baremetal servers are security-sensitive. Organizations and individuals alike can create a physical separation of resources. Although security is a complex and broad terminology in cloud computing, using a bare metal server over other hosting options enhances security substantially.
More processing power: Thanks to the limited access offered by bare metal servers, no one can tamper with your project’s stability meaning your server will have higher processing power.
Keeps costs predictable: Bare metal hosting servers can do a number on your wallet but you can predict this cost since it is billed on a monthly basis. You can also opt for other billing options such as hourly or weekly plans but the bottom line is that you will know ahead of time how much you are expected to pay for using hosting servers.
Better service: By eliminating the “noisy neighbor syndrome”, you get a better quality of service. Technically, a client can hold someone responsible if something wrong on the system.
Flexibility: With bare metal, server configurations can be quite precise. You can combine both hypervisors and bare metal servers for enhanced performance.
Lower overhead costs: Compared to virtualization platforms, bare metal servers incur less overhead. The reason is that hypervisors utilize the server’s processing power on a higher scale. Less overhead means increased speed and improved responsiveness. Bare metal also gives room for more hardware customization which further enhances speed and responsiveness of the system.
An affordable solution for data transfer: When it comes to outbound data transfer, bare metal is always the most cost-effective option on the table. You can get several free data transfer terabytes on certain dedicated servers which is not the case with other virtualized environments. However, always keep in mind that these scenarios are heavily dependent upon the offers in question. Also, there’s never any guarantee of partnership.
Disadvantages of Bare metal
Like all hosting infrastructure options, bare metal has a few disadvantages:
Instance limitations: When compared to virtualized instances, bare metal servers have restrictions regarding the types and sizes of instances available.
Backup challenges: Hypervisors capture snapshots of the VM’s memory space allowing for ease of backup. Bare metal servers don’t have this feature. Duplicating machine images to be used as the backup and can be quite difficult to do. Additionally, bare metal doesn’t support recovery from tape drives unless the tape drives and the BMR software are from the same manufacturer.
Complexity: Bare metal processes can be intensive often relying on a third party operating system to make configurations.
Advantages of hypervisors
What if you don’t have the luxury of being a single tenant as in a bare metal model? Perhaps you handle a dynamic workload and need to utilize resources round the clock. Hypervisors, too, have quite a huge number of benefits particularly for workloads that need to be run and spun for a relatively short period of time before turning them off.
Quick scalability: If you need more server space, a hypervisor can easily grant you additional servers in no time.
Ease of backup: Virtual machines allow for a smooth and seamless backup protection compared to traditional applications. The process of securing a backup is complicated and time-consuming hence can cause serious downtime. With VMs, snapshots of data can be captured and saved in record time making the process easier and manageable.
Improved mobility: The VM’s structure has been designed in a way that it operates independently separate from the underlying hardware. This enables it to have the ability to roambetween local and remote servers that have an abundance of resources.
Optimization of hardware: Hypervisors have the ability to optimize hardware to a greater extent. It allows virtual machines to run on their own by dividing resources into separate entities. In addition, with virtualized servers, hypervisors make VMs super mobile to a level that the underlying hardware is rendered irrelevant.
Security: Virtual environments are quite secure too. Even if the virtual instances haven’t been physically separated, they are technically isolated from each other. Sure, they may be on the same server but they have no knowledge of each other. So yes, the noisy neighbor effect may be witnessed but the hypervisors are secure.
Disadvantages of Hypervisors
Some of the reasons some people shy away from using virtualized environments include the following:
High implementation cost: Creating a virtual environment requires the purchase of both hardware and software. Other times, devices may need to be manufactured, developed or purchased in order to implement the infrastructure.
Availability issues: People and organizations who utilize virtualization often worry about what will happen to their data in the event that their assets are unavailable. If this were to happen, the organizations might struggle to maintain their positions in the industry. There’s also the issue of third-party providers making the control of data almost impossible.
Requires cohesiveness of all links: Being the sole tenant means you are in full control of your operations. With virtualization, you don’t have such control because there are quite a number of links required to work seamlessly to achieve one goal. If one of the links is compromised, the entire server will not function optimally.
Bottom line
When all is said and done, there’s no straight answer to the question of which hosting infrastructure to employ for your organization. Every situation is unique. Every project has a different set of requirements. Both bare metal servers and hypervisors have their pros and cons; it all boils down to what your organization needs at the time. Bare metal servers offer all the performance benefits of physical dedicated servers without the contract. They cost way less than virtualized environments, have better speeds, higher processing power and have better flexibility. If your business involves collecting vast amounts of data over a short period of time, then you certainly want to go the beta metal servers’ way. Hypervisors, on the other hand, are great if you are not after the elite performance displayed by bare metal servers. If your goal is to utilize resources and consolidate infrastructure in one computer hardware but still achieve high levels of performance, virtualization is definitely the best option for you. With virtual environments, you can enjoy a high latency, reduced overall costs, mobility and the ability to scale up and or down depending on the requirements at hand. Still, you can create a hybrid solution that ensures you get the best of both worlds and ultimately maximize your RIO.
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