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This article mainly explains "what kind of server is a bare metal server". The content in the article is simple and clear, and it is easy to learn and understand. let's go deep into the editor's train of thought. Let's study and learn "what kind of server is a bare metal server"?

In the spirit of eliminating all the dead corners of knowledge, today we are going to find out what a bare metal server is.

At first glance, the name bare metal server is really confusing-aren't servers all metal? Do you have wood or plastic?

Does the word "naked" mean that the server does not even have a shell?

In fact, the reason why bare metal servers (Bare Metal Server) have such a strange name is mainly to draw a line between them and virtualized servers.

As I said in yesterday's article, one of the major features of cloud computing is that users rent computing resources from cloud service providers from purchase to rent. Most of these leased computing resources are not physical resources, but virtual resources.

Yes, this "most" means that there are special cases. The bare metal server is one of the typical special cases.

Bare metal servers are also cloud computing products.

Why is it necessary to "reverse" and provide physical servers in the context of full cloud?

The reason, of course, is that there is something wrong with virtualization.

Virtualization is not perfect. It has two unavoidable defects.

The first point is the loss of performance.

Although the virtual cloud hype, but, after all, the introduction of a "third party", operating systems and applications in the call of hardware resources, not so easy to directly control.

Virtualization

For some high-performance businesses (such as high-performance computing), virtualization can bring performance latency. There is also a performance loss if a dense Iamp O (input / output) operation occurs.

The second point is the noisy neighbor effect.

The traditional calculation is to buy a house, a single-family villa, live on their own is very naughty, but the price is expensive, and inflexible, difficult to change houses.

Cloud computing (virtualization) is renting a house, a building, and many people (multi-tenants). Although everyone is in a separate room, you will still hear the noise if you open the party next door. During the evening rush hour, everyone bathes with water, and your water will definitely get smaller.

In other words, although virtualization promises resource quotas, your experience will still be affected when other tenants are suddenly overloaded. For some applications that require high performance and stability, this cannot be tolerated.

Virtualization also has some other disadvantages, for example, some hardware devices do not support virtualization, and some new hardware features (such as the new features of CPU) are not available under virtualization, which make users very unhappy.

To sum up, for "VIP users", virtualization is not perfect to meet their needs.

As a result, there are bare metal servers.

In fact, to put it bluntly, bare metal servers are physical servers, only with some upgrades.

Bare metal servers are still rented. The cloud service provider rents you a dedicated physical server, and you are the only tenant.

Bare metal server, which is not limited to physical server, is a combination of physical server and cloud service.

"bare metal" means that it does not include the corresponding operating system and software, which is optional later by the customer. Most cloud service providers' bare metal server products do not provide local hard drives (which can be supported), but mainly provide CPU and memory.

In terms of hard drives, they will recommend you to use cloud disks. Because, the use of cloud disk can achieve fast installation, image direct installation. Otherwise, you can only use a traditional installation (such as PXE), in which case, the delivery time will not be minutes, at least half an hour to 1 hour. Moreover, business migration or fault recovery can be troublesome.

Bare metal servers can usually seamlessly connect and be compatible with other cloud services provided by cloud vendors, such as network services (such as VPC proprietary network), cloud database services and so on.

In this way, it is convenient for bare metal servers to communicate and cooperate with users' existing virtual servers, and cloud resources can be used effectively.

Bare metal servers themselves are not completely incompatible with virtualization. Now some cloud service providers' bare metal server products are compatible with a variety of Hypervisor platforms (managing physical resources and building a virtualized underlying platform. For example, VMware, KVM, Xen, Virtual Box, all belong to Hypervisor. For more information, see here: link), that is, virtualization is also supported.

A cloud service provider has also developed a "flexible" bare metal server, self-developed virtualization technology, which can solve the virtualization performance cost problem mentioned above, and can have complete processor features at the physical machine level, which feels quite fierce.

In the following table, you can clearly see the difference between elastic bare metal servers and traditional physical servers and virtualized servers:

Bare metal server, which users are using it?

As we mentioned earlier, bare metal servers have the feature of monopolizing resources. Therefore, it is very suitable for some scenarios that require high security isolation, such as banking, finance, securities and other industries. These industries have compliance requirements for business deployment, do not allow you to share with others, and the data must be physically isolated. So, they are the primary customers of bare metal servers.

The second category of users are those who have extreme requirements for performance. For example, in scientific research scenarios such as supercomputing, aerospace, cosmic observation and even high-energy physics, they have to deal with an unprecedented amount of data and have high requirements for the stability of the computing process, so they prefer bare metal servers.

The third category of users is game development. The online game business also has high requirements for system performance, and the service is stable enough, so it tends to use bare metal servers.

Bare metal servers have been around since 2014 and haven't been developed for a long time. On the whole, its market scale is growing, and more and more users are in demand for it. Many cloud service providers, including Aliyun, Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud, bowed themselves into the game and launched their own bare metal server products.

According to Grandview Research, a well-known research firm, the total market value of bare metal servers was about $1.3 billion in 2016. By 2025, it is expected to reach $26.21 billion. I have to say, this is an attractive piece of cake.

Thank you for your reading. the above is the content of "what kind of server is a bare metal server". After the study of this article, I believe you have a deeper understanding of what type of server a bare metal server is. the specific use of the situation also needs to be verified in practice. Here is, the editor will push for you more related knowledge points of the article, welcome to follow!

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