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Bringing An End To Hypervisor Vs Bare Metal Debate



The debate whether hypervisors are faster than bare metal resurfaced at the vmworld 2019 conference. VMware has long maintained that hypervisors have many advantages over Bare Metal, including efficiency and cost.


A Type 1 hypervisor is a layer of software installed directly on top of a physical server and its underlying hardware. Since no other software runs between the hardware and the hypervisor, it is also called the bare-metal hypervisor.




Bringing an end to hypervisor vs bare metal debate




Once you boot up a physical server with a bare-metal hypervisor installed, it displays a command prompt-like screen with some of the hardware and network details. They include the CPU type, the amount of memory, the IP address, and the MAC address.


Type 2 hypervisors run inside the physical host machine's operating system, which is why they are called hosted hypervisors. Unlike bare-metal hypervisors that run directly on the hardware, hosted hypervisors have one software layer in between. The system with a hosted hypervisor contains:


As with bare-metal hypervisors, numerous vendors and products are available on the market. Conveniently, many type 2 hypervisors are free in their basic versions and provide sufficient functionalities.


VMs clearly have a place in many Kubernetes clusters, and that will probably never change. But when it comes to questions like performance optimization, streamlining capacity management or reducing operational complexity, Kubernetes on bare metal comes out ahead.


From hardware acceleration to running applications directly on bare metal, hardware automation enables organizations to save resources and increase productivity. During this OpenDev event, operators will discuss hardware limitations for cloud provisioning, share networking challenges, and collaborate on open source requirements directly with upstream developers.


  • Topics include: End-to-end hardware provisioning lifecycle for bare metal / cradle to grave for hypervisors

  • Networking

  • Consuming bare metal infrastructure to provision cloud based workloads


Whether you want to run containerized applications on bare metal or VMs, organizations are developing architectures for a variety of workloads. During this event, users will discuss the infrastructure requirements to support containers, share challenges from their production environments, and collaborate on open source requirements directly with upstream developers.


High Memory instances are available as both bare metal and virtualized instances, giving customers the choice to have direct access to the underlying hardware resources, or to take advantage of the additional flexibility that virtualized instances offer including On-Demand and 1-year and 3-year Savings Plan purchase options.


EC2 High Memory bare metal instances (e.g. u-6tb1.metal) are only available as EC2 Dedicated Hosts on a 1-Yr and 3-Yr reservations. EC2 High Memory virtualized instances (e.g. u-6tb1.112xlarge) are available for purchase via 1-Yr and 3-Yr Savings Plan, On-Demand instances, and as Dedicated hosts.


EC2 Mac instances are bare metal instances and do not use the Nitro hypervisor. You can install and run a type-2 virtualization layer on x86-based EC2 Mac instances to get access to macOS High Sierra, Sierra, or older macOS versions. On EC2 M1 Mac instances, as macOS Big Sur is the first macOS version to support Apple Silicon, older macOS versions will not run even under virtualization.


The purpose if this blog is to discuss the close alignment between Cisco ACI and containers. Much like containers, Cisco ACI provides accelerated application deployment with scale and security. In doing so, Cisco ACI seamlessly brings together applications across virtual machines (VM), bare-metal servers and containers.


With containers, we have seen only the tip of the iceberg. Docker containers are beginning to get traction in private clouds and traditional Data centers. Cisco ACI plays a pivotal role in integrating ACI unified policy model across a diverse infrastructure comprising bare-metal, VMs and Containers.


This is the basic architecture of the Xen Project Hypervisor. We see that the hypervisor sits on the bare metal (the actual computer hardware). The guest VMs all sit on the hypervisor layer, as does dom0, the "Control Domain". The Control Domain is a VM like the guest VMs, except that it has two basic functional differences:


Yeah, I understand that. The new sconfig certainly is better than the 2016 one. Even though I'd prefer it clickable (and winlogon too) since user32 is still present, even on the most stripped down installation. But I guess you don't want to close the door to bringing back something like Nano Server on bare metal ...which would be awesome IMHO.


And yes, PowerShell7 is great, especially since it's self-contaned. I can bring it on a flash drive, plug it onto any stripped down installations of mine, and it works. It even runs on the Nano Server (although I've so far tested it only in container, not in 2016 VM or bare-metal installation).


Again, this isn't about winning the entire market, the focus of this debate is "will the MS hypervisor make important inroads" and will it have new wins. I believe when IT environments start looking at how they need to consolidate imporant, performance based workloads such as SQL server, Sharepoint, and Exchange, and start thinking about creating large shared infrastructure that can be easily provisioned, then we are going to see Hyper-V gather significant market share.It doesn't make sense to put these types of workloads on a much more expensive virtual infrastructure solution like VMware.


I don't see people throwing their existing investment in VMware infrastructure out in the garbage -- after all, this debate is about whether Hyper-V can make significant inroads, not completely displace the competition. However, that being said, its very easy to migrate form a VMware-based virtual infrastructure to a Microsoft-based one. First, System Center can manage both a VMware and a Microsoft environment, allowing co-existence and easy migration. Additionally, Hyper-V comes with Windows Server, so most customers already have it. VMware administrators can jump right into Hyper-V by leveraging their existing virtualization skills and combining them with the Windows skills they already have, making the transition very easy. It is probably also worth mentioning that Microsoft has a distinct advantage with Hyper-V over VMware because it owns the source code to Windows, and thus can achieve much higher levels of performance and integration by using their own hypervisor.Additionally, from a skills acquisition and training perspective, Hyper-V will be built into the Windows 8 client, allowing anyone with a standard, low-cost commodity PC to learn how to use Microsoft's Type-1 hypervisor on their desktop, eliminating the need for products like VMware Workstation. Server 8 and Hyper-V can also be installed on commodity 64-bit PC hardware, unlike ESXi, which primarily requires VMware certified enterprise-class servers to run.


Since I brought it up, I'll tell you that it's already a two-horse race: VMware and the rest of the pack (The other horse). Companies have standardized on the best technology, which is VMware's. Microsoft might gain but it will be a small percentage of companies who are virtualization dabblers and Microsoft bigots. Though Hyper-V has some compelling features, VMware has them plus it has everything else too: Management, performance, stability, security. First, VMware is now what we used to call ESXi, which is a very light bare-metal hypervisor.Some people complain about VMware's pricing but those are not the decision makers, they are the techies. People who have the financial responsibility for SLAs and customers aren't going to bank on an unproven technology. When the techies are home playing video games or geeking out over a new gadget, the C-level executives are planning and constructing next year's budget and their long-term plans for expansion and they want stability, scalability and VMware's experience behind that.


Application proliferation has given rise to heterogeneous environments, with application workloads being run inside VMs, containers, clouds, and bare metal servers. IT departments must maintain governance, security, and visibility for application workloads regardless of whether they reside on premises, in public clouds, or in clouds managed by third-parties.


VMware NSX is designed to address application frameworks and architectures that have heterogeneous endpoints and technology stacks. In addition to vSphere, and VMware public clouds, these environments may include other hypervisors, containers, bare metal operating systems. NSX allows IT and development teams to choose the technologies best suited for their applications. NSX is also designed for management, operations, and consumption by development organizations in addition to IT.


The data plane was designed to be normalized across various environments. NSX introduces a host switch that normalizes connectivity among various compute domains, including multiple VMware vCenter instances, KVM, containers, bare metal servers, and other off premises or cloud implementations. This switch is referred as N-VDS. The functionality of the N-VDS switch was fully implemented in the ESXi VDS 7.0 and later, which allows ESXi customers to take advantage of full NSX functionality without having to change VDS. Regardless of implementation, data plane connectivity is normalized across all platforms, allowing for a consistent experience.


Antrea is an open-source Kubernetes-native networking and security solution that can be installed in clusters running in private or public clouds and bare metal servers. The Antrea data plane implementation is based on Open vSwitch. This choice makes it highly portable across Linux and Windows operating systems and allows hardware offloading. Antrea provides a comprehensive security policy model that builds upon Kubernetes network policies by introducing the concepts of policy tiering, rule priorities, and cluster-level policies. Antrea includes troubleshooting and monitoring tools for visibility and diagnostic capabilities such as packet tracing, policy analysis, and flow inspection. Antrea instances running on multiple clusters can be integrated with NSX to provide a consistent policy model and centralized visibility across clusters, clouds, and workload form factors (containers, VM, bare metal). Antrea is the default Container Network Interface (CNI) for Tanzu guest clusters and TKG. 2ff7e9595c


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