LXC (LinuX Container) and a Virtual Machine (VM) are both used to create isolated environments for running applications, but they operate in different ways.
Virtual Machine:
1. A VM is an emulation of a computer system. It provides a complete system platform that supports operating system level virtualization.
2. With VM, you can run different types of operating systems on the same physical host, like Windows on Linux, or Linux on Mac, and so on.
3. VM includes physical hardware emulation, where an entire operating system, with its own memory management, processes, and hardware (CPU, hard disks, network interfaces, etc.) is loaded.
4. It tends to use more resources and provides a less efficient performance than LXC, due to the overhead of running full instances of operating systems.
LXC:
1. LXC is a type of virtualization that is closer to an enhanced chroot (change root) environment than to a full virtual machine.
2. It allows for operating system level virtualization, but all the containers are using the same underlying operating system (kernel).
3. It shares the host system’s kernel, but bundles the application in a package with other dependencies, ensuring that it doesn’t interfere with other containers or the host system.
4. LXC uses less resources (CPU, memory, storage) compared to VMs as it shares parts of the host operating system.
So, in summary, VMs provide a higher degree of isolation (an entire separate system), but this comes with increased resource usage, while containers like LXC provide less isolation (shared kernel), but are lighter on resource usage and bring less overhead.
