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Farshad Foroughi
Asked: 2020-12-13 05:19:22 +0800 CST

Is Docker like Virtualbox?

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So I'm new with Docker title and after reading some info about it now I have a thing in my mind. please help me understand it better. Is Docker like Virtual OS services like Virtualbox app? But it can only simulate with my Linux base! Am right?

docker

3 Answers

  1. VirtualBox is a virtualization hypervisor, responsible for providing isolation of hardware resources to guest systems, allowing multiple operating systems to run at the same time on a single computer or server. It provides virtual hardware resources and devices to each operating system, such as processor, memory and network card. Each guest system is composed by an operating system, applications and libraries, exactly as the ones you would install in a computer or server.

    Docker is a containerization platform which is responsible for providing isolation of software resources, allowing multiple applications to run in isolation at the same time on a single host system without the overhead of running multiple operating systems. It provides isolation of software resources to each container, such as independent users, processes trees and mount points, by using namespaces. Each container is composed by applications and libraries and share the host system kernel.

    enter image description here

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  2. Docker is a container manager Virtualbox is a VM manager

    so there are fundamental differences between these two

    differences between containers (like docker) and VMs are explained here https://geekflare.com/docker-vs-virtual-machine/

    summary: What’s the Diff: VMs vs Containers

    VMs Containers
    Heavyweight Lightweight
    Limited performance Native performance
    Each VM runs in its own OS All containers share the host OS
    Hardware-level virtualization OS virtualization
    Startup time in minutes Startup time in milliseconds
    Allocates required memory Requires less memory space
    Fully isolated and hence more secure Process-level isolation, possibly less secure
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  3. Best Answer

    No. Docker is a management tool; not a virtual machine.

    From https://www.docker.com/resources/what-container#/package_software

    CONTAINERS

    Containers are an abstraction at the app layer that packages code and dependencies together. Multiple containers can run on the same machine and share the OS kernel with other containers, each running as isolated processes in user space. Containers take up less space than VMs (container images are typically tens of MBs in size), can handle more applications and require fewer VMs and Operating systems.

    enter image description here

    versus

    VIRTUAL MACHINES

    Virtual machines (VMs) are an abstraction of physical hardware turning one server into many servers. The hypervisor allows multiple VMs to run on a single machine. Each VM includes a full copy of an operating system, the application, necessary binaries and libraries - taking up tens of GBs. VMs can also be slow to boot.

    enter image description here

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