The NIC is the hypervisor: bare-metal guests in IaaS clouds
Jeffrey C. Mogul, Jayaram Mudigonda, José Renato Santos, Yoshio Turner · 2013
Cloud computing does not inherently require the use of virtual machines, and some cloud customers prefer or even require “bare metal ” systems, where no hypervi-sor separates the guest operating system from the CPU. Even for bare-metal nodes, the cloud provider must find a means to isolate the guest system from other cloud re-sources, and to manage the instantiation and removal of guests. We argue that an enhanced NIC, together with standard features of modern servers, can provide all of the functions for which a hypervisor would normally be required. 1