Container vs VM: Hypervisor War is Over!

I'm going all in on containerization in 2025. What is the state of container vs VM in 2025? Take a look at a few of the advantages of containers vs VM and also how it is making the focus on hypervisors more and more irrelevant. We look at running a Kubernetes cluster across Proxmox and ESXi hosts to prove the point. Do you need to get rid of your hypervisor though? Let's find out.

Introduction - 0:00
VMware vs Broadcom setting the stage: 0:40
Why focus on hypervisor and VMs less critical - 1:11
Containerized technologies becoming more the standard - 1:53
Can be run anywhere - 2:14
Looking at K3s node running in Proxmox and in ESXi - 2:30
Containers don't care about the hypervisor - 3:50
Containers are easy to move - 4:25
Illustrating the point of pulling containers - 4:39
Refactoring between different hypervisors with virtual machines - 5:58
Cutting costs using open source hypervisors running containers - 6:43
Containers allow you to much more easily spin up new apps - 7:11
Automation is much better with containers and Kubernetes - 8:30
Cross platform and environments - 8:51
DevOps much better and almost require containerization - 9:19
Should you rip out your hypervisor? 9:34
How do you start? 10:13
Experiment with docker and standalone hosts - 10:29
Pi-hole might be a good project as an example to start with - 10:40
Setup a Kubernetes cluster or single-node cluster - 11:00
Run containers on different platforms and move them around - 11:22
Integrate DevOps tools with containerization - 11:39
I have seen a significant reduction in resources in home lab with containers - 12:04
Wrapping up the discussion on container vs VM in 2025 - 12:35

[SB-qmwg]

The cons I've run into containerizing prod is more points of failure, more monitoring and health-checks, name-space confusion and sometimes collision, and of course the dreaded lack of realistic bench marking to scale lab prototypes to prod. Sometimes in really big clients, it just made more since for bare metal silos and cluster based on topology requirements and/or region. The big gain is security, but as we've seen in the news, not too many are leveraging that lately😆

[ckckck]

I think the LXC containers that proxmox makes use of could have had some attention as well. Great video!

[TazzSmk]

I understand what you're trying to say, but I'm afraid your point of view is 2 years behind,
sure we can talk about containers being hypervisor-agnostic, but we definitely can't avoid the fact they aren't hardware-agnostic,
stuff like x86 vs arm, NIC passthrough, GPU/NPU passthrough and such,
also containers are merely an application layer so you still need a proper backend,
take a simple example - run docker on your casual desktop PC, but allocate full dedicated gpu capability to your docker environment - it will be more tedious than running whole docker stack of apps later :D

[musiqtee]

I use both paradigms. Containers for “narrow” services, and VMs where compute, GPU and/or storage matters. Some are “mildly” clustered, and some have failover - some hosts and some services.

ZFS is the common storage & cloning backbone, as it is “ignorant” of my various architectures, FS, OS and sharing shenanigans.

A homelab mess - but very stable over ca four years (please, no jinxing…) 😅

[warclan]

I think there are different points of view. I do use a VM for development. Because the company assign me the resources depending on needs i can get a machine with 4-40 CPUs depending on needs . For production it is a different subject. Like deployments and delivery CI/CD times

[Bill_W_N]

Thank you for the informative video. You've convinced me that it is probably time to to start looking at containerization more in-depth. My main concern with them is security and isolation. I've typically been one to build from the ground up in a VM so that I know the integrity of the build. Pulling various containers from various sources just doesn't give me that warm fuzzy feeling as not having anything extra in it. I do agree that the benefits you mentioned are very compelling and have convinced me to start small with an additional pi-hole instance and go from there. IF you think it worthwhile, I'd love to see a video with your take on container vs hypervisor security. Thanks again.

[lordaca]

I work with containers all the time. They are great in small lab environments but have seen very few work great at scale. It’s so much harder to debug the dependencies that are packaged with the containerized applications. I can provide several times we got a container from a vendor and it had issues running with production security requirements. We even had a well known vendor stop supporting docker as they did not want to help fix an issue. I cannot go to leadership and say well we spent all the money on a tool license and now have to change our tech stack to deploy the tool. Containers tech is still maturing and works only when the company that provides them actually understands them.

[giftcp]

This one of the most insightful video I have seen on these technologies

[hubstrangers]

Thank you....looking forward for those projects....

[chromerims]

Good essay👍 vlog
Thank you, happy new year

[xard]

VMs migrate with exact memory state within seconds with virtually zero interruption to a service from host to another in a hypervisor cluster. How do you approach migration from host to another using containers in cases where you need to provide highly available service?

[michailgiannopoulos]

Kubernetes is awesome..until you have to troubleshoot something and things go bad!

[chucksw]

I have used docker on my Openmediavault nas, i hope to use it in more of a seperate sever dedicated enviroment in the future once i setup proxmox or Nutanix in my home lab😊

[bfrdk]

There are some who, maybe rightfully, brag about not using containers at all. They have extremely lightweight VMs and they do it for isolation. Containers share a hosts kernel, and so technically if an application in a container is vulnerable to a stack overflow or had some other vulnerability that can lead to root access of the container host then all over containers on the host can be compromised.

VMs are completely isolated except for in a very few cases like spectre and meltdown. If your BIOS/UEFI, firmware, and hypervisor OS is up to date and patched, using VMs would be a safer and more stable option.

[prashanthb]

Thanks for this talk sir. I am a total noob and maybe I will learn containerisation in the coming months.

[Dizzydre]

I work in Industrial Automation and Controls. No one is using Docker at all. Docker is for applications and services, through. We need to run programming software, historical trending, alarm servers, and SCADA. I dont think any of that will ever be on Docker.

[druxpack]

I've worked for 3 midsize (1000+ employee) companies since 2013, and yet to see an actual use case for containerization...they have been traditional verticals; Healthcare, Insurance and Banking...so other than development houses, who is actually using it? I've discussed it with all of my contemporaries over the years, but not a single production system has been moved over from VM to containers....

[bertnijhof]

I started using Virtualbox in 2009, during my last year for retirement it allowed me to run Windows XP and MS-Office in a VM for compatibility with work. After retirement I used Virtualbox for distro hopping. I now use Virtualbox to separate application areas into secure areas and areas more vulnerable for hacking. For example I have a VM for email, (a)social media and another one exclusively for banking, which is encrypted by VBox. My Host OS runs OpenZFS and when I received an infected Email from an ex-colleague I simply restored the snapshot from before the hack. I don't think containers add much to my security.

The main purpose of a container is that you can run its latest stable version in each (Linux) VM. So I do run the latest stable snaps of Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice in Ubuntu 16.04 ESM and sometimes the almost 9-year old Ubuntu runs newer versions than many other Linux distros. Ubuntu 16.04's LibreOffice version even beats occasionally Ubuntu 24.04's LibreOffice deb file version. The snap in Ubuntu has of course a security advantage, because of its integration with Ubuntu's firewall.

[SyberPrepper]

Lots of sound tips and suggestions. Containers are on my list of things to learn. One thing holding me back in the work environment is whether the pre-built containers you get from a distribution place (not sure of the correct term) on the web are safe. For example, can/should I run Veeam in a container I download from someplace. Are building containers easy so I don't have to rely/trust someone else. Are government contractors using containers successfully? Thanks.

[maxitx]

what you recomend to mount cehpfs subvolumes in vms or docker containers?
thanks in advance