Difference between Hypervisor and Container Architecture
ACT 1:
In the good old days, our applications would run on physical servers. This was a problem when it came down to scaling the applications. Servers were needed. More servers were needed and even more. Also, diffrent applications need different servers. This was getting tricky. And COSTLY!!
ACT 2:
Then came VMware to the rescue. So, there was hypervisor that would separate the applications and the Operating System from the physical hardware underneath. Hypervisor was also called a VM or virtual machine monitor. Hypervisor allowed multiple application per server. And to accomplish this, many VMs were needed. VMs are essentially slices of physical’s server hardware.
In this hypervisor architecture, each VM would have its own processing power, memory disk space. And all those VMs are the slices of the real server underneath.
In addition to the above, each VM would then need their own dedicated OS. So, for ex.,4 VMs would need 4 installations of Operating Systems. Now, each OS would need its own CPU, RAM or disk. And this is just to run the OS. NOT THE APPLICATION YET. Again, these OS would need licenses, the cost of resources, operations etc. And VMware or hypervisor solve the purpose.
THEN CAME THE CONTAINERS!!!!
ACT 3:
Let’s take a look at the container architecture:
In the container architecture diagram shown above, we had the server and then an OS. Just one OS installation on our physical server.
After that, we essentially carve or slice up that OS into secure containers. And then in each of those containers, we install all our apps. Net result, as you can, is getting rid of much of the fat from the hypervisor architecture.
