Bare Metal
Physical computing hardware used directly without a general-purpose virtualization layer between the operating system and the machine.
Plain English
Run software on a physical server dedicated to that system instead of inside a shared virtual machine.
In context
Bare-metal infrastructure can offer direct hardware access predictable isolation and specialized performance while requiring teams or providers to manage provisioning capacity and hardware lifecycle.
Example
“The latency-sensitive workload runs on bare metal with dedicated network interfaces.”
When you'll hear this
- infrastructure design
- performance planning
- specialized workloads
Common misunderstanding
Bare metal does not always mean equipment is owned or located on-site because providers can offer remotely managed bare-metal servers.
Also known as
bare-metal serverphysical serverdedicated hardware
Commonly used by
Related terms
Often compared with
Updated: 2026-08-31
