5.1. Setting up an environment to host virtual machines
Virtualization is by no means a requirement to make use of the Genome tooling, though it is the more common than "bare metal" provisioning.
The machine used to host virtual machines is called the Cloud Appliance. As the name suggests, there can be one-to-many physical machines. The first goal of this machine is to provide and environment to host virtual machines and for that reason are always provisioned on "bare metal". The second is to provide an effective way to manage resources amongst underutilized commodity hardware.
Since virtualization plays such a key role in the Genome environment these machines amongst the first that users of the Genome tooling desire to get up and running quickly.