Hi  Dave,

Bare metal is physical machine offered which does not come with any VM Ware software we can bring our own OS image or VMware or KVM or Hyper V image.

Below link show how to bring I your own image, below link also shows features of Baremetal cloud.

https://cloud.oracle.com/compute/bare-metal/features

https://docs.us-phoenix-1.oraclecloud.com/Content/Compute/References/bringyourownimage.htm

Yes they are really bare metal machines.

nowadays you can use vm's there as well, but you can really have the physical machines to you disposal as well.