[zaarn]

VMs, lots of them.

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

[ekianjo]

Why not use containers instead of VMs? You can run about 10x more Docker instances than VMs on the same hardware.

[CorpOverreach]

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.

Can't do all that with containers.

[Mister_Snuggles]

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.

[moondev]

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.

[deadbunny]

Because contrary to the hype, containers aren't the right solution to everything.

[mileycyrusXOXO]

While you are correct that they are not a one size fits all solution, would you care to elaborate to the specifics of this instance?

[deadbunny]

Because not everything I want to run in best suited (or even available) to linux.

[zaarn]

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.

[barkingcat]

If you want to run multiple different OS's (or even different distributions of the same OS) containers don't work.

[ekianjo]

There is nothing preventing you from mixing a couple of VMs and have containers on top of some of them.