Virtual machines such as Hyper-V, VMWare, and Zen were popular choices for data center virtualization a few years back. Enterprises experienced cost savings by implementing virtualization over traditional bare metal usage. It has also helped many enterprises to utilize their existing infrastructure in a much more optimized manner. Since VMs support automation, many enterprises have experienced less management efforts with virtual machines. Virtual machines have also helped organizations to get isolated environments for applications to run.
On prima facie, both virtualization and containerization exhibit exactly the same characteristics. However, in a nutshell, containers, and virtual machines are not the same. Therefore, it is unfair to make an apple-to-apple comparison between VMs and containers. Virtual machines and containers are two different techniques that address different problems of virtualization. This difference is evident in the following diagram...