Glossary3 sections1 min read
What is Bare metal vs VM vs container?
A bare-metal rental gives you the whole physical server. A virtual machine (VM) runs your own operating system on virtualized hardware with GPUs passed through. A container runs your software in an isolated environment on a host managed by the provider.
Why it matters when renting a GPU
Bare metal gives full control and every GPU in the box; VMs give OS-level control with some isolation overhead; containers start fastest and need a compatible driver on the host.
Check what you can install (drivers, kernel modules) before choosing: containers cannot change the host driver.
Worked example
An 8-GPU H100 SXM server rented as bare metal gives you all 8 × 80 = 640 GB of GPU memory and its full NVLink 4 (900 GB/s) fabric.
Frequently asked questions
- Which is best for training?
- Multi-GPU training benefits from bare metal or full-node VMs with NVLink. Containers suit single-GPU jobs and quick experiments.