It's common parlance to use "running on bare metal" as the opposite of "running in a virtual machine", i.e. a synonym of "running your OS without a hypervisor".

It's common parlance to use "running on bare metal" as the opposite of "running in a virtual machine", i.e. a synonym of "running your OS without a hypervisor". This usage has been commonplace for a long time, probably two decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-metal_server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-metal_server