Infrastructure Management: When to Pick Bare Metal or Virtualized Servers

Infrastructure management isn't about taking sides. Too often, teams get pulled into “X is better than Y” debates that miss the bigger picture: your compute stack should serve your needs, not industry hype.

A common decision point in the past has been the choice between bare metal or cloud hyperscalar virtualization. Nowadays, the answer isn't 1 or 0. To get the strategy right, you'll need to understand where we've come from, what the cloud has offered (and taken away), and where the industry is headed next.

A Quick History

When it comes to infrastructure management the history is rather straightforward. Everything started with bare metal. Most organizations owned servers, ran their workloads directly on top of them, and managed every layer of the stack.

As time passed, technology evolved which offered two MAJOR changes.

1. Physical servers shrank dramatically - The size of each “box” became orders of magnitude smaller, making modern data centers feasible.
2. Hardware became cheaper - CPUs, RAM, and disk storage followed a rapid decline in cost, allowing more compute per dollar.

Traditional hardware scaling was victim to long refresh cycles and hard to predict hardware usage. And so, because businesses needed faster, more flexible access to compute and wanted to buy based on usage, the cloud was born.

The cloud promised (and delivered):

• Faster deployment times
• Global reach
• Lower upfront costs
• On-demand scaling

But it also introduced:

• Opaque pricing
• Vendor lock-in
• Less control
• Significant markups over time

Over time, this was a model that absolutely dominated (for good reason). Now, 20 years or so into the cloud, we're seeing a renewed resurgence toward bare metal. The main difference? It doesn't always have to be on-prem. You can use the same cloud usage model with bare metal cloud providers OR run those same types/brands of servers in a co-location and if you really want, you can manage your own locations.

As the gap between the market for virtualization and bare metal shrinks, now is a great time to look at when each of these is the right choice.

When is Bare Metal the Right Choice?

Are performance, predictability, security, and control non-negotiable? You might be looking at gaining quite a bit from adopting bare metal into your infrastructure.

Let's take a closer look at some places bare metal can have a big impact.

Performance: Virtualization Overhead Is Real

All virtual machines run on a hypervisor layer. Part of what this layer does is emulate hardware. While there are now very efficient hypervisors like (KVM and Hyper-V) there's always some cost. The places that are impacted the most are:

• CPU-bound workloads: Virtualization intercepts privileged instructions, introducing latency.
• I/O operations: Virtual disk and network layers abstract real hardware, leading to slower disk access and increased packet processing time.

The typical range of overhead on performance is between 2% and 10%, but that number can change based on the type of workload running on the virtualized node. If hypervisor load itself spikes, downstream performance can degrade as well.

On bare metal, the software runs directly on the server. There's no virtualization to account for, so performance is better AND more predictable. With the major rise of AI and high performance computing workloads, it's no wonder so many teams are adding bare metal to their compute stack.

Cloud Markup and Long Term Cost

The cloud offers maximum flexibility and usage based pricing, but that flexibility does carry a premium over longer term bare metal servers.

Chistadata found that:

And that's before you add things like:

• Egress fees
• Premium for storage IOPS
• Support contracts
• Redundant service costs (e.g., cloud firewalls vs built-in security groups)

Flexibility

If you've been around for a while or have a lot of experience with bare metal, this might be a very eye-catching headline for something that's talking about the advantages and use cases for bare metal. Flexibility? Are we talking about the same bare metal?

If we take a look at Cycle users consumption of bare metal. Most Cycle users take advantage of bare metal in their compute infrastructure stack. Not only can they get bare metal performance for their containers, bare metal supports nested virtualization. Nested virtualization means that a user can also deploy virtual machines on top of the bare metal nodes right alongside their containers.

When to Use Virtualization

Yes, bare metal is making a comeback, but virtualization is still incredibly useful. Virtualization is more flexible on resource shape, is available from more locations globally, has become more and more performant, and is just all around very useful.

So, what are the biggest calls for virtualization and when should your organization consider it?

Legacy Workloads

Virtual machines offer incredible support for legacy workloads. This extends to any type of work that might need:

• A specialized kernel
• Older packages, runtimes, etc
• More intricate process management that simply suits virtual machines a bit more

These things are just currently easier to manage in virtual machines, not to mention that containers don't virtualize the kernel.

Isolation as Resource Ownership

Virtual machines get their own resource ownership:

• It gets a dedicated slice of RAM and CPU pinned by the hypervisor.
• It has its own kernel and device drivers.
• It runs as if it were its own physical machine, not just a namespaced process.

So the hypervisor basically guarantees control as it's fully virtualized. VMs can also make full system calls, load kernel modules, and run things like system daemons without granting full access to the underlying server powering the VM.

For teams that need deterministic performance, full root control, or security boundaries stronger than what containers can offer, VMs are a great choice.

Be Strategic

Bare metal offers raw power, predictability, cost-efficiency, and stronger security. Cloud-based virtualization brings elasticity, global reach, and convenience. That all comes at a steep premium.

Cycle exists to give teams real choice and is becoming the go to platform for teams that are looking for a truly hybrid approach when it comes to managing their infrastructure; especially for organizations looking for a VMware or Kubernetes alternative.

By enabling provisioning across bare metal and cloud, and running both containers and virtual machines side by side, Cycle lets you align your infrastructure management strategy with your actual workloads, not the trend of the year.

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