Atm I'm running about 15 VMs on about 8 cores in a dedicated box somewhere and it's definitely noticable. I would love to shove some core services at home and have 32 cores to play with to give some more headroom
Because all of the containers may not be of the same operating system? Networking on containers is also a bit different.
There are also reasons for having some more isolation between guest OSes.
On my ESXi box at home I have:
* A VM that hosts my NAS shares. This does nothing other than host the NAS shares, as I want to be sure no silly experiment of mine interferes with that.
* A general-purpose VM, where I do run some containers out of (UniFi controller, Plex, etc)
* A VM running Windows Server for my Domain Controller
* A secondary vSwtich with isolated no uplink to the rest of the network. This is my mini malware testing lab.
* A VM running pfSense that I'll sometimes use to allow selective access out of the isolated vSwtich out to the internet, but not to the rest of the network.
I have many use-cases where containers are simply unsuitable.
I'm using FreeBSD, but these apply just as well to Linux. I wanted to run ZoneMinder, which is not available for FreeBSD, so I simply spun up a CentOS VM and installed it.
On the flip side, I wanted to run Home Assistant, Node-RED, and some related utility programs. All of these are happy to run on FreeBSD, so they can live happily in a Jail (FreeBSD's equivalent to a container).
Some people virtualize their router by dedicating a NIC to the appropriate VM. I don't know if this would even be possible in a container.
I run proxmox on my 16 thread ryzen and would love more cores.
I currently run 4 linux vms for my kubernetes cluster and a
4 core macOS vm with passthrough for my gtx 1080i. I have 64 gb of memory so the only thing stopping me from running my windows 10 and arch desktop vms at the same time is more cores.
Not everything runs great on containers. My internal firewall is a pfSense, BSD based which doesn't run on a linux kernel.
Atleast 3 VMs need patched kernels or more recent kernels/regular kernel updates than the host provides.
Additionally VMs provide a bit more isolation than a simple container (atleast unless you do unpriv'd container).
I do have containers too, about 20 of them, half of them unpriv'd, all of them LXC. Docker is not suitable for my use case at all and frankly I don't think you should suggest someone should switch to Docker without knowing their use cases.
Build servers, video conversion/streaming, and hosting game servers are use cases that would certainly benefit from this in a hobbyist/home environment.
And just to expand on that, I'd like to (for instance) run multiple remote desktops (including a photo editing station), probably a decent plex/emby VM, probably something to do transcoding etc etc. Not to mention dev VMs etc.
You can do a lot with one thing and administer that one thing without having lots of individual boxes doing stuff, and for me it'd be way faster and a single cost, so it'd work out as a big improvement.
In a 'money is no object have all the time in the world' it would probably be better to have something dedicated to do each task, but that's not that flexible on top of the other drawbacks (cost in money/time).
Atm I'm running about 15 VMs on about 8 cores in a dedicated box somewhere and it's definitely noticable. I would love to shove some core services at home and have 32 cores to play with to give some more headroom