The difference between VMs and containers

VMs such as Hyper-V, VMWare, and Zen were popular choices for data center virtualization a few years ago. Enterprises experienced a cost saving by implementing virtualization over the traditional bare metal usage. It has also helped many enterprises utilize their existing infrastructure in a much more optimized manner. As VMs support automation, many enterprises experienced that they had to make lesser management effort with virtual machines. Virtual machines also helped organizations get isolated environments for applications to run in.

Prima facie, both virtualization and containerization exhibit exactly the same characteristics. However, in a nutshell, containers and virtual machines are not the same. Therefore, it is unfair to make an apple-to-apple comparison between VMs and containers. Virtual machines and containers are two different techniques and address different problems of virtualization. This difference is evident from the following...