Home > APEX > Cloud Platforms > White Papers > Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift > Understanding Bare Metal
Red Hat uses the term Bare Metal to describe a cluster where the OpenShift software is deployed directly on server hardware. Meaning the physical nodes boot the Red Hat CoreOS directly. This is different from the traditional, virtual deployment where the cluster nodes are virtual machines running on a hypervisor. Virtual deployments were common because they offered an abstraction between the hardware and the OpenShift cluster, which was useful because OpenShift had no ability to manage the hardware beyond basic power on/power off/reboot functions.
With the Cloud Platform Foundation Software created by Dell for the APEX Cloud Platform, we now have the ability to do full hardware lifecycle management within the OpenShift Web Console using the same workflow that updates the OpenShift software. This means the hypervisor licensing costs are removed and there is no overhead between the hardware and OpenShift software. This also means one less layer of the stack to maintain and secure.