"Bare-Iron" Virtualization
Featuring VMware ESXi 4.0 and vSphere

Mainstream Virtual Machine technology is one of the most exciting technological advancements in computing in recent years. We deploy solutions that make use of VMware ESXi on "bare iron" (i.e., no Operating System required on host machine) and embedded Virtual Machine technology.

VMware ESXi has reached version 4.0 now, as has the corresponding VMware vSphere client. The transition from ESXi / ESX version 3.5 to ESXi / ESX version 4.0 went quite smoothly on our own servers using VMware vSphere Host Update Utility 4.0. We highly recommend this latest release of VMware's bare-iron virtualization solution, as it introduces many much anticipated features and improvements including substantially better high-resolution guest-OS displays (to 1920x1200 and beyond, which is great for software development tasks), and other enterprise class virtualization features.

There are two common approaches to virtualization: "hosted" and "bare-metal". Hosted virtualization software runs as an application or "guest" on top of a general-purpose operating system. Bare-metal virtualization, like VMware ESX / ESXi, interfaces directly with computer hardware, without the need for a host operating system.

There are various compelling reasons to use Bare-Metal Virtualization with VMware ESXi; one of those being security. The picture above quickly demonstrates how the hosted/host-based virtualization solution differs from the bare-metal approach, and how the bare-metal hypervisor offers some protection against common security issues.

One rather significant potential savings that can be realized with bare-iron virtualization is a simple one: the cost of an Operating System license for the host machine (as compared to using a "hosted" VM solution where you need that host-system's operating system license). We run VMware ESXi exclusively as our bare-iron virtualization technology on our own powerful high-efficiency servers and high-efficiency workstations, like our custom built 1U SSD-equipped SuperMicro units; no dependency on any proprietary and costly host operating system like Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 here!