[sofixa]

I'm not sure I follow. Ideally your bare metal machines have an easy bare OS with some config that is easy to repave, and are ephemeral-ish (not a lot of state).

Your "machine for testing" would be a container. Decommissioning a container is easy. Decommissioning a physical machine only happens when it's obsolete.

[stackskipton]

sigh Not everything in the world is containers. Applications running outside of container still exist in many companies for various reasons including political ones.

[jamesfinlayson]

Yeah this - I know my container is pushing a lot of things to containers (I think customer-facing web stuff is a reasonable use for containers) but stuff like ActiveDirectory controllers, Exchange servers - pretty much any Microsoft thing running on Windows - will continue to run on a VM for the forseable future.

[sofixa]

Okay, but that's not at all what this thread is about? We're talking about having a VM intermediary between containers and bare metal. Not applicable to cases where you don't have containers because your workloads aren't fit for them.