Differences of Bare Metal and Virtual Machines

Bare Metal servers are dedicated physical machines allocated to the single tenant. The user operating system is loaded directly onto server and allows for maximum theoretical performance.

In contrast, Virtualization is a technology that allows running multiple logical systems to run on a single physical server. This is used to maximize hardware utilization, provide machine customization, and improves system management through fast backups and restores.

Virtualization typically "costs" 1-3% of total performance, however actual results depend on the specific use case.

There is no performance impact for Denvr AI clusters because the critical resource - the GPUs - are not virtualized, and instead are passed into the VM as native hardware.

Feature comparison

Performance

	Bare Metal	Virtual Machines
Overhead	✅ None	Hypervisor requires CPU and memory resources
Consistency	✅ High consistency in performance	Potential variability in performance

Security

	Bare Metal	Virtual Machines
Tenant isolation	✔️Single tenant only	✔️Single or multi-tenant
Multi-user access	May require additional software to manage user isolation and Quality of Service	✅ Quality of service is enforced
Security risk	✅ Lowest risk of cross-tenant impact	Higher risk due to shared infrastructure. Virtualization is a mature technology in use since the early 2000's.
Data privacy	✔️Denvr has no mechanism to access the system, including for operational support	✔️Denvr can monitor and maintain the system hardware instead of the user

Management

	Bare Metal	Virtual Machines
Node types	✔️Full node only	✔️Allows customization of machine resources including single-GPU instances
Scalability	Full node only	✅ Instance sizes can be changed dynamically without re-provisioning
Software and drivers	Denvr only installs the GPU and fabric drivers.	✅ Pre-configured images are available with required software dependencies.
Time to launch	Slower	✅ Fastest
Backup and restore	Difficult to backup the operating system for recovery	✅ Simple to snapshot, clone, copy, and duplicate machine images.