Hypervisor- vs. Container-based Virtualization

For a long time, the term virtualization implied talking about hypervisor-based virtualization. However, in the past few years container-based virtualization got mature and especially Docker gained a lot of attention. Hypervisor-based virtualization provides strong isolation of a complete operating system whereas container-based virtualization strives to isolate processes from other processes at little resource costs. In this paper, hypervisor and container-based virtualization are differentiated and the mechanisms behind Docker and LXC are described. The way from a simple chroot over a container framework to a ready to use container management solution is shown and a look on the security of containers in general is taken. This paper gives an overview of the two different virtualization approaches and their advantages and disadvantages.