Container vs Virtual Machine Architecture¶
Run the Container vs VM MicroSim Fullscreen
About This MicroSim¶
The two dominant compute virtualization patterns side by side. VMs stack a full guest OS per unit, giving strong isolation but big artifact size and slow boots. Containers share the host kernel, giving you density and sub-second startup at the cost of weaker isolation.
Click Scale Up to see how many more containers fit on the same host as VMs. Click Highlight Shared Kernel to surface the security tradeoff.
Embedding This MicroSim¶
<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/information-systems/sims/container-vs-vm-architecture/main.html"
height="602px" width="100%" scrolling="no"></iframe>
Lesson Plan¶
Learning Objectives¶
By the end of this activity, students will be able to:
- Compare VM and container architectural stacks
- Explain why containers boot faster and weigh less than VMs
- Articulate the isolation/density tradeoff
- Recommend VM or container for a given workload
References¶
- Docker. What is a Container?
- VMware. Virtualization 101.