Why Containers Are Not Vms

Containers running on bare metal utilize system resources more efficiently than vm based containers.

Why containers are not vms. In this post i ll explore some pros and cons of containers vs. Your server goes awry spin up a recent snapshot and you re back up and running. Compared to containers vms are best used to. But what about containers.

Containers on the other hand share resources with other containers on the host system including the operating system kernel and libraries. The average resource utilization in vm based container environments may be as low as 15. In essence what you ask is a more general topic vms vs. This topic discusses some of the key similarities and differences between containers and virtual machines vms and when you might want to use each.

Vms are capable of running far more operations than a single container which is why they are the traditional way monolothic workloads have been and are still today packaged. Virtual machines and containers differ in several ways but the primary difference is that containers provide a way to virtualize an os so that multiple workloads can run on a single os instance. Less cpu and memory usage than would be seen when using a vm. So they are not considered 100 isolated.

This is one of the major reasons why containers are often used for running specific applications. Vms work very well can save serious money and make failover easier. Vms do not interact with other vms on the same server at all each vm is a self contained unit and contains a copy of everything from the operating system to libraries and databases. From a purely technical perspective a linux container much like a vm is just a means to isolate one or more computational processes and run them on shared hardware.

Containers share the same kernel between them and the host. To me containers are not that much different from vms. Containers and vms each have their uses in fact many deployments of containers use vms as the host operating system rather than running directly on the hardware especially when running containers in the cloud. But that expanded functionality makes vms far less portable because of their dependence on the os application and libraries.

Regardless of platform the same pros and. Containers are an abstraction performed at the operating system os level that allow for efficiencies over vms. With vms the hardware is being virtualized to run multiple os instances. Xenapp can support hundreds of users running off the same server whereas a similar solution utilizing virtual machines can only support dozens.

Vms are assigned resources at start up time and they tend to tie up those resources whether they are using them or not. I suppose containers are cheaper than vms but i haven t checked.