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I would like to move my servers to virtual machines. This is because it'll make it easier for me to fire up more machines and back them up in case the physical server is damaged (I'm not aware of other benefits). While I use virtual machines normally as isolated workstations, I'm not aware of the full set of their benefits for servers. What I mean is: I see people use (and promote) VMWare vSphere for this. More licenses seem to cost more (exponentially), and I don't know why. I'm wondering whether lxd (It's like docker, but persists its state) is a replacement to this.

What are the benefits of using a virtual machine (vSphere specifically or generally any other kind) over using simple containers like lxd?

The Quantum Physicist
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1 Answers1

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It really depends on what you want or need. With real virtual machines running a full operating system, you can delegate ownership to other people in the company. For example, you remain the owner and maintainer of the ESX servers while someone else can be in charge of maintaining and updating the Windows servers running your Active Directory domain. With containers, it's all just one operating system which makes this delegation of authority and responsibility more difficult.

A second topic to consider is the operating system itself. When running LXC/LXD you can only run linux (as far as I know) while when using ESX, you can run different linux distributions, some windows servers, even BSD and the like. Every instance can be custom fitted to the task at hand.

Next, complete VMs running on ESX require more overhead with regards to memory and CPU usage. It also adds overhead in terms of maintenance (patching and updating of software).

Finally, ESX and Windows require more licences than when you run everything as containers.

Tommiie
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