bare-metal provisioning

Bare-metal provisioning is the process of installing an operating system (OS) or Type 1 hypervisor directly on a computer's hardware. 

Bare-metal provisioning can be done manually by inserting an operating system CD or hypervisor DVD into a new computer and responding to question prompts, or it can be automated across a large number of commodity computers with special software tools such as BMC's BladeLogic or Puppet Labs' Razor. 

Bare metal provisioning should not be confused with bare metal imaging, a scenario in which a golden image that contains an operating system, drivers and applications is used to clone identical systems.

See also: bare metal environment, bare metal restore, Ghost imaging