Hi,
I am a newbie to Linux and a newbie to working with servers.
I have been given two Dell PowerEdge R620 servers to play with, and I would like to set one up with Linux. This whole exercise is meant to learn a set of IT skills and get some experience under my belt when I want to start looking for jobs in 2 years’ time.

I have been advised to give containers a try as it is generating a lot of momentum.
Ideally I would like to setup a main server with a Container supported OS like Ubuntu Core or Container Linux, running multiple Linux Server Distro’s in their own container. Starting with the easy options, and work my way up.

I think I understand that I need some kind of a container (template)/image for the specific OS I want to run when creating the container, https://us.images.linuxcontainers.org. This I believe to be a list of non-official container images.

When I start googling for official containers or for containers not on the list, it gets all a bit confusing, as a lot of distros support containers, but don’t tell if they can be containerized. I also often end up at Docker, which is also a bit unclear, if this is a Docker package supported by the Linux Distro, or a Linux Distro that runs inside a Docker container.

My main questions are:
-Can any Linux Distro run inside a container?
- Are containers for Docker, Ubuntu, CentOS, Container Linux all interchangeable?
- Is there a list of official container images/(templates) of Linux server distros?

Here is some good general info for you.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Linux_Containers
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VirtualBox
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Docker
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_containers
https://opensource.com/resources/wha...nux-containers

There are several types of containers, including the application containers (like Docker) and system containers (like LXD).
With the application container, the container is meant to run just a specific application, and will exist for the duration of the execution of the application.

On the other hand, a system container is similar to a virtual machine, but it uses only features from Linux Containers (set of Linux kernel features to contain processes) instead of needing too many hardware resources (such as VT-x hardware support from the CPU).

For your hardware, you can launch a system container (LXD) in about 1s. With a VM, it would take much more time.

In LXD, you can one of the official repositories of images, Ubuntu images and All images. All are official.

For your hardware, it depends mostly on the amount of memory how many containers you can launch. The smallest runtime is the Alpine Linux (few MBs) container image, and you can fit way too many for your test.

1 members found this post helpful.

I am starting to understand the differences between a Docker Container and the LXD container. What makes Docker more usable for running applications instead of installing the application on an OS?

I run a couple of Media "Servers" at home, and I found that they all have a Docker supported container. Could I run docker inside a LXD container, or on a Linux OS inside a LXD container?

The server is a dual 6C with 96GB or RAM. At the moment I like to learn to setup, use and maintain containers to develop IT skills, and I think it will be easier to handle when I screw things up or want to try a different OS instead of having to reinstall the server every time.

This is about adding LXC support for Arch Linux (Host OS)?
This is about installing/running Virtual Box on Arch Linux?
This is about installing/running Docker on Arch Linux?
This is about installing XEN Hypervisor Host OS?
How does this relate to ArchLinux, as it doesn’t seem to run on ArchLinux?
Do you know if this can be run on a SD card? My servers original run VM EXSi on a dual/mirror SD card setup , (when handed to me) **
Here I am getting a bit confused. These are container frameworks, but not Operating Systems that have container support?
Is each container targeted at a single container framework, which isn’t supported outside that framework?
The main purpose of using containers is to make it easier and more reliable to test and move software from system A to System B?
Is there any purpose in using containers to run Operating Systems, or are Hypervisors the better options for doing that?

My server driver package supports Red Hat (5.8, 6.3), SUSE Enterprise (Linux 10, 11) and XEN Server (6.1)** out of the box .Is the Arch Linux kernel related to any of these?

Sorry for all these basic questions. I am just trying to get my head around this, and trying to understand which approach would be best in which situation.

That's what Docker was designed for.
As I said in the other thread, containers consume fewer resources. One or two orders of magnitude fewer resources. Hypervisors, on the other hand, allow you to run a complete, unmodified (i.e. not containerized) OS.
ArchLinux is not at all related to RHEL or SLES. However the ArchLinux wiki is of legendary quality and is an excellent resource to understand Linux concepts. You should be careful to translate ArchLinux commands to RHEL and SLES.

RHEL 6 and SLES 11 are fairly old, and their end of life is probably not too far in the future.

At the moment I am looking at using XenServer. Version 6.1 is supported via OS deployment via the LifeCycle controller, but a hardware check on the Citrix website is showing support for all Versions 7, and possibly version 8.

I'll start with this, and run a virtual machine with container support and tryout application containers first. The containerized OS is most likely to complicated for me at this stage anyway.