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A bare metal environment is a type of virtualization environment in which the virtualization hypervisor is directly installed and executed from the hardware. It eliminates the need for a host operating system by directly interfacing with the underlying hardware to accomplish virtual machine specific processes.
A bare metal environment may also be called a tier-1 environment.
A bare metal environment is typically created using bare metal hypervisors that don’t require the support of a host operating system. The hypervisors are installed on the hard drive and can create virtual machines as in a typical virtualized environment. Each virtual machine has its separate guest OS and share of memory, computing power and hard drive storage. The hypervisor has its own device drivers and interacts with each component directly for any I/O, processing or OS specific tasks.