A new IBM research report provides a performance comparison of virtual machines, specifically KVM, and Linux containers, specifically Docker. “The fact that Linux can host both VMs and containers creates the opportunity for an apples-to-apples comparison between the two technologies with fewer confounding variables than many previous comparisons,” the report notes. As expected, Linux containers offer less overhead than full virtualization with KVM, but the difference is surprisingly small in many cases especially for CPU and memory-intensive workloads.
Access the full report here.