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Containers vs Virtual Machines
Table of Contents
While a VM simulates a physical machine with an application, a container simulates a logical packaging of an application. Read through to understand the differences between a VM and a container in detail.
Virtual machines (VMs)
VM simulates a physical machine with an application, supporting binaries and an operating system (OS image) encapsulated into it and is an abstraction of the hardware layer. VM technology can use one physical server to run the equivalent of multiple servers (each of which is called a VM). So, while multiple VMs run on one physical machine, each VM has its own copy of an OS, applications and their related files, libraries and dependencies.
VMs were introduced before containers and transformed deployment of multiple applications efficiently on existing machines. Before the introduction of VM, it was normal for each application to run on a separate physical machine.
VM is achieved through VM hardware and are managed by a hypervisor. A hypervisor, can be a combination of hardware, firmware or software that deploys, monitors, and manages VMs. A hypervisor supports multiple VMs each with their own OS.
Containers
A Container simulates a logical packaging of an application with required binaries encapsulated into it and is an abstraction of the software layer. The encapsulated container image is isolated from the environment in which it runs. This allows container-based applications to be deployed with ease, regardless of the target environment which could be a private data center, the public cloud, or even a personal computer. A single container can be used to run a microservice or even a software process to a larger application. Containers deploy by using virtual-memory hardware and operate though orchestrators usually provided by the containerization platform, the orchestrator manages resources used by the container and facilitate OS level communications.
A tabular comparison of additional differences and similarities between VMs and Containers follows:
| Characteristic | Containers | Virtual Machines |
|---|---|---|
| Instance Security | An individual container is isolated from other containers and the host.
However, container boundary security could be compromised if best practices are not followed.
Some suggested practices include
|
VM provides strong isolation from other VMs and the host. This allows different apps to be hosted by VMs on the same server or cluster. As the OS image is part of the VM the associated security protocols can be implemented on the VM. In addition, the OS resources and management tools are available to the app. This makes VMs more secure as compared to containers. VM platform security capabilities have been leveraged to isolate each container in a lightweight VM, for example, Microsoft VM’s Hyper-V isolation mode. |
| Portability and Deployment |
|
|
| Persistent storage | Use local storage for a single node, or SMB shares for storage shared by multiple nodes or servers. | Use a virtual hard disk (VHD) for local storage for a single VM, or an SMB file share for storage shared by multiple servers. |
| Load balancing | Orchestrators facilitate start and stop of containers to manage use of resources based on load and availability. | The hypervisor facilitates start and stop of VMs. VM load balancing to manage load and improve availability, can also involve moving running VMs to other servers in a cluster. |
| Fault tolerance | The orchestrator recreates a new cluster node, inserting any containers that were running, in a failed cluster node. | The hypervisor moves VMs to a new fail-over server cluster, if the existing one fails. The hypervisor restarts the VM OS on the working cluster. |
| Networking | Containers use virtual network adapters. | VMs uses an isolated view of a virtual network adaptor. |
Summary
The primary difference between VM and Container is that a container does not have an OS, multiple containers can run on a single OS instance. While a VM includes an OS instance, allowing multiple OS instances to run on one physical hardware. Running software in containerized environments generally uses less space and memory than running software within different VMs, since the latter requires a separate copy of the OS to run on each VM. Containers can be run within VMs.
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