Virtualization & Containers for the non-technical executive (in 1 minute).

A Physical Host is to Virtualization Host as an House is to an Apartment Building

A Virtualization Host is to a Container Host as an Apartment Building is to a Hotel

A house is a collection of specialized rooms: a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, etc.

A computer or physical host is a collection of components: CPU, RAM, storage, graphics hardware, networking. Each component like a room in a house.

An apartment building is similar to a house. It shares many of the same rooms, but each apartment exists within a shared infrastructure. While each apartment will have its own kitchen and bathrooms, all the apartments will rely on the same boiler to provide heat and hot water. Similarly, electricity and water are not delivered to each apartment individually rather one connection is delivered from the street and distributed amoung all the apartments.

A virtualization host will have one or more CPUs, a common pool of RAM and a common pool of storage shared amoung the virtual machines on the physical host. Each virtual machine like an apartment in an apartment building with the virtualization host distributing shared resources to each virtual machine.

A hotel is a large collection of bedrooms, with the kitchen (room service) and some living spaces (bar, lounge, etc.) as a shared resource. In an apartment building each apartment is uniquely designed to the taste of the occupants. In a hotel each room is more or less the same, similar furniture, fixtures, phones, televisions, sheets and towels.

The individual containers on a container host are like the guest rooms in a hotel. Each container running its own service and common elements like the operating system image being shared amoung multiple containers.