Bare Metal Environment

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What Does Bare Metal Environment Mean?

A bare metal environment is a type of virtualization environment in which the virtualization hypervisor is directly installed and executed from the hardware. It eliminates the need for a host operating system by directly interfacing with the underlying hardware to accomplish virtual machine specific processes.

A bare metal environment may also be called a tier-1 environment.

Techopedia Explains Bare Metal Environment

A bare metal environment is typically created using bare metal hypervisors that don’t require the support of a host operating system. The hypervisors are installed on the hard drive and can create virtual machines as in a typical virtualized environment. Each virtual machine has its separate guest OS and share of memory, computing power and hard drive storage. The hypervisor has its own device drivers and interacts with each component directly for any I/O, processing or OS specific tasks.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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