Describing a system, process, or environment that is *not* utilizing virtualization technology. This means the operation or execution occurs directly on the physical hardware, without the abstraction of virtual machines, containers, or other virtualization layers. An unvirtualized system typically has direct access to hardware resources (CPU, memory, storage, network), leading to potentially higher performance, lower overhead in some cases, and a more direct management approach, but also less flexibility and portability compared to its virtualized counterparts.
Unvirtualized meaning with examples
- In the early days of server infrastructure, most systems were unvirtualized, with each physical server running a single operating system and application stack. This direct hardware access resulted in strong performance for these applications, but at a cost of reduced hardware utilization. Moving to unvirtualized systems required physical presence to perform the operation, since there was not the ability to remote into the physical hardware.
- Legacy databases often ran on unvirtualized hardware to guarantee specific performance characteristics and minimize latency. The direct hardware access was critical for high transactional volumes. However, this environment, while very performant, lacked the flexibility that virtualized machines offer in terms of scaling and providing resources.
- Before widespread adoption of cloud computing, dedicated gaming PCs, were largely unvirtualized, providing the maximum processing power directly to a single game to optimize responsiveness. Players prized the direct hardware access for achieving the best possible in-game experience, though the unvirtualized architecture could make hardware upgrades difficult.
- An embedded system controlling an industrial robot may operate in an unvirtualized environment because guaranteed real-time performance is crucial and any virtualization overhead could be unacceptable. The systems design allows very controlled access to the hardware at all times.
- While virtual machines offer great isolation for security, some high-security applications, particularly those involved in cryptography, may opt for unvirtualized environments, where potential side-channel attacks, such as those that extract keys by observing patterns on the virtualized environment's hardware, are minimized.