What is Bare metal server?

IT infrastructures are irresistibly moving to the Cloud. More and more companies decide to outsource material resources and use a flexible rental model. Specialized web hosts offer different usage models for individuals as well as for professionals. These models are often offered with new conditions. However, an innovative concept is not necessarily hidden behind it.

The creative ideas of the hosts are attractive but nevertheless leave the users very often perplexed. A marketing term that has recently gained notoriety in the context of the democratization of the Cloud is the bare metal server. We tell you what it is and under what circumstances this web hosting product can be interesting.

Summary

• What is a bare metal server?
• Structure of a bare-metal server
• Who is bare metal hosting suitable for?
• Advantages and disadvantages of a bare-metal server

What is a bare metal server?

Bare metal in English means “bare metal” and therefore suggests a concept that focuses on the physical side of web hosting: the hardware. Basically, a bare metal server is nothing more than a ” dedicated server “: a computer in the data centre of a host whose resources are only accessible to a single client. It is for this reason that it is also named Single Tenant’s Server. Bare metal is thus distinguished from conventional shared hosting products such as the Virtual Server, where the web projects of different clients are hosted in separate virtual machines but which rest on the same hardware base.

The benefits of dedicated web hosting are obvious:

• Root access: bare metal servers are offered as opposed to multi-tenant servers with root access (root-access). In shared or shared hosting, it is generally not desirable for a user to be able to modify the root directory of the hosting platform. The administration is therefore limited to project directories. The bare metal server, meanwhile, offers unlimited administration possibilities. This gives users more freedom when installing software components and when configuring the server.
• Dedicated hardware: virtual machines on shared hosting platforms are largely independent of each other due to encapsulation. However, in this hosting model, in theory, a website can be affected by unresponsive scripts or by vulnerabilities in other web projects that are on the same physical machine. With the bare metal server model, these effects called “Noisy-Neighbor” which disrupt the performance and stability of a virtual server from neighbouring projects are avoided. Hardware resources such as hard drive space, processor (or CPU for central processing unit, CPU in English) and RAM are only used by the single-tenant of the server.

This is why bare metal servers are particularly suitable for demanding Web projects which constantly require high resources. Projects that must meet specific compliance requirements are also required to be hosted on dedicated hardware.

Structure of a bare-metal server

The structure of a bare metal server is always based on user requirements. There are basically two scenarios: traditional bare metal servers and bare metal servers with the hypervisor.

Note

A hypervisor (or “Virtual Machine Monitor”, VMM) is software that allows the operation of guest systems, called VMs (virtual machines). Depending on the type of hypervisor, the software is based on an operating system (hosted hypervisor) or directly on the hardware (native hypervisor). As part of the bare metal server, native hypervisors are used. The hypervisor thus communicates directly with the physical machine without the need for an intermediate server operating system.

• Traditional bare metal server: it is in fact a classic dedicated server, where the operating system (OS) administered by the user like Windows Server, Ubuntu, SUSE, Red Hat, Debian or CentOS is based directly on the hardware. All user applications run directly on the operating system. Traditional bare metal servers include both dedicated rental servers as well as corporate servers located on your premises.
• Bare metal server with hypervisor: in the Cloud environment, the Bare metal server also exists in combination with a hypervisor. It is based directly on the hardware (native hypervisor) and provides users with an administration interface for managing virtual machines. User applications do not run directly on the hypervisor, but separately in virtualized guest operating systems. The classic hypervisors are KVM: the virtualization functionality native to the Linux kernel, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere or Citrix XenServer.

The following graphic is a schematic representation of the two methods:

If the hardware resources of several dedicated servers are available to the user as part of bare metal hosting, this concept is then called Cloud bare metal.

The bare metal hosting solution grants users access rights to the advanced server: while control, access by a shared hosting client is limited to a single virtual machine, the software component managed by the user (OS or hypervisor) of the bare-metal server rests directly on the hardware. There is, therefore, no level of abstraction managed by the host between the hardware resources of the server and the user.

On the “bare metal” market, the hypervisor-based usage scenario is highlighted. User-driven virtualization software allows this hosting method to quickly and easily set up virtual machines. A bare-metal server with hypervisor thus offers a flexible alternative to the classic dedicated server, which is often associated with manual configuration which is often tedious for users.

Who is bare metal hosting suitable for?

A bare-metal server is primarily intended for users who wish to set up complex Web projects on a personalized hosting platform. A server with dedicated hardware is recommended for online stores and websites with constantly high traffic. For database or application servers in a professional environment, which must meet specific security requirements, hosting preferably on bare metal servers is also recommended.

Root access allows individual configuration without compromise. The user chooses according to the project if he wishes to allocate the hardware resources of the server to a single operating system or if he rather wishes to distribute them over several systems using self-managed virtualization software.

As with shared hosting, bare-metal servers are also offered at different performance levels. However, while the Virtual Server is in an average price segment, the cost for dedicated hardware is relatively high. Bare metal is therefore mainly intended for businesses and professional Web projects. People who run nonprofit websites or semi-professional online stores are generally better off with shared hosting.

Note

A root server offers experienced administrators many possibilities to adapt software components to individual needs. However, this implies solid specific knowledge. Instead of opting for a bare metal server, website operators who are not familiar with the technical side of web hosting should instead consider managed hosting, where the provider directly takes care of the administration of the platform. hosting.

Advantages and disadvantages of a bare-metal server

Are you unsure whether the bare metal hosting model is the right one for your project? In order to help you in your decision-making, we have listed in a summary table the advantages and disadvantages of bare metal servers:

About the author

DMTwebhosting.com’s Editorial Team prides itself on bringing you the latest web hosting news and the best web hosting articles!

You could also link to the news and articles sections:

http://www.DMTwebhosting.com/blog