Name some limitations of containers vs VM

Technology CommunityCategory: DockerName some limitations of containers vs VM
VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago

Just to name a few:

  • You can’t run completely different OS in containers like in VMs. However you can run different distros of Linux because they do share the same kernel. The isolation level is not as strong as in VM. In fact, there was a way for “guest” container to take over host in early implementations.
  • Also you can see that when you load new container, the entire new copy of OS doesn’t start like it does in VM.
  • All containers share the same kernel. This is why containers are light weight.
  • Also unlike VM, you don’t have to pre-allocate significant chunk of memory to containers because we are not running new copy of OS. This enables to run thousands of containers on one OS while sandboxing them which might not be possible to do if we were running separate copy of OS in its own VM.