Those who are familiar with Virtual Machine (VM) and not familiar with modern containers (such as Docker, Rocket by CoreOS, VMware Photon, or similar) could get the impression that we were talking about VM while saying that a container could not only contain and execute the contained code, but also to move it to a different location without any change to the contained code. If so, that would be quite an apt assumption. VM does allow all of that, and a modern container can be considered a lightweight VM as it also allows the allocation of resources and provides the feeling of a separate machine. Yet, a container is not a full-blown isolated virtual computer.
The key difference is that the bundle that can be passed around as a VM includes an entire operating system (with the application deployed). So, it is quite possible that a physical server running two VMs would have two different operating systems running on it. By contrast, a physical server (or a VM) running three...