About Bare Metal Servers for VPC

You can provision a dedicated bare metal server on your own software-defined, private cloud and deploy to multizone regions. A bare metal server is ideal for expanding capacity of applications that benefit from elastic, quick provisioning, and deprovisioning. Accelerate deployment with preset server profiles for your high-performance workloads.

With your IBM Cloud® bare metal server, you get the full suite of IBM Cloud® VPC networking benefits, plus enhanced networking throughput (up to 200 Gbps). Using a dedicated bare metal server in your VPC helps you physically isolate data and applications where you can then further customimze and manage your compute, storage, and networking.

Key features

The following information lists the key features that are included with a bare metal server.

Workload profiles

You can choose different bare metal server profiles to match your individual workload needs and help accelerate deployment of your compute resources. You get maximum performance without oversubscription. Additionally, IBM Cloud VPC Infrastructure for bare metal servers offers profiles with or without secondary NVMe drives.

Balanced profiles are ideal for common high-performance cloud workloads.
Memory profiles are ideal for more memory intensive cloud workloads.
Compute profiles are ideal for CPU sensitive cloud workloads.

For more information, see Profiles for Bare Metal Servers for VPC.

Advanced Intel® Xeon® CPUs

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC for VPC Infrastructure are deployed only with second Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8260 processors, Intel® Xeon® Gold 6426Y processors, and Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8474C processors that are built for cloud-enterprise applications, HPC workloads, virtualization, enhanced networking, and security.

SmartNIC technology

Configure enhanced network throughput up to 200 Gbps.

Benefits

BYOL

Maximize the value of your own licensing. Bring your own license with IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC for VPC with iPXE. For more information see Network booting your own operating system with Bare Metal Servers on VPC.

Rapid scaling

Provision your bare metal server in 10 minutes or less when resources are available.

Network orchestration

A network orchestration layer handles the networking for all bare metal servers that are within an IBM Cloud VPC across regions and zones. Create multiple, virtual private clouds in multizone regions. Network orchestration also helps improve security, reduce latency, and increase high availability.

You are responsible for security on your bare metal server. That means upgrading or patching the operating system as needed to make sure that vulnerabilities are addressed in a timely manner. Bare metal servers with associated floating IP addresses are internet-facing and you need to take appropriate precautions. For more information, see Understanding your responsibilities.

Pricing options

Pay-as-you-go bandwidth is per gigabyte. Your billing charges accrue from provision to cancellation, and are billed in arrears. Total pricing includes bare metal server instance profiles and software, bandwidth speed, internet data transfers, and optional VPC services. Each additional component is priced separately and included as part of your total IBM Cloud VPC charge. Service tiers are bound to your account, not to any specific VPC.

For more information about pricing, see the bare metal server provisioning page.

Comparing Bare Metal Servers for VPC

VPC versus classic infrastructure

With Bare Metal Servers for VPC, you can enjoy the security and performance of the private cloud with the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud. Compared to the classic bare metal infrastructures, Bare Metal Servers for VPC provides better connectivity and networking throughput leveraging integrated VPC concepts.

Comparatively, use cases for bare metal are common regardless of the deployment path through VPC or classic. Users can choose classic for highly customized servers in a traditional flat network, or they can opt for fixed-profile servers in VPC that take advantage of software-defined networking.

Bare metal servers versus virtual server instances

In general, you choose bare metal servers over virtual server instances if you need to install a hypervisor or run real-time workloads that take advantage of physical cores, full memory bandwidth, or local storage.

Bare Metal Servers for VPC sets up a VMware virtualization environment in a VPC. Bare Metal Servers for VPC offers improved security compared to a virtual server instance as customers fully manage the physical resources of a bare metal server until it is decommissioned. By contrast, virtual server instances can share resources such as CPU, memory, and processes, across an IBM managed hypervisor.

Keep the following lifecycle operations differences in mind:

For bare metal servers, you can restart or power the server off and on. When you power off a server, the server is powered off physically, but the data on it is preserved, and you continue to be billed. Suspend billing is not supported for dedicated bare metal servers.
For virtual server instances, you can restart, stop, and start the instance. These functions don't impact the physical server status. Except for instances on dedicated hosts, billing is suspended when the instance is powered off. Any persistent storage continues to be billed. For more information about suspend billing, see Suspend billing for VPC.

Next steps

See to the following topics to start planning and creating your bare metal servers on VPC: