Helloooo nurse!

I think I may just have to fire up my TS440 again...

First things first, which types of containers do all y'all prefer? I've been looking into LXc/LXD and Docker, each appear to have their strengths.
I am relatively new to the Linux community, but I've been tinkering off and on since 2010. My prefernce for kernal is Ubuntu, as I am hopefully going to be experementing with my first openstack cloud early next year. (I am finally able to provide all of the hardware requirements once I purchase one more box)

In the more short term, I am hoping to set up my thinkserver to have containers for a Minecraft server which will host about 5 or 10 players at once, My Plex media server, and maybe one network storage server.

Any input from some of you more experienced Linux users would be very appreciated on the topic of what sort of containerization I should delve into in order to serve my short term needs and also to be compatable with an openstack cloud type environment for my long term goals.

Thank you all for your kind consideration, this community kicks all kinds of ass.

-d

Re: kicks: IT does. It REALLY does! A few jerks (me) and the rest are some of the BEST people!

I prefer OpenVZ for server containers. It gives me the control, power, and administration options that are perfect for nearly every use case I have. It is optimal on CentOS6 but can run CentOS7 containers nicely, as well as containers based upon about two dozen other distributions. Alas, the OpenVZ team has been torn apart by Parallels: who own the management. A fully compatible kernel for a CentOS7 host or later may never be released. (One can hope, but it is not looking good right now.)

For Application containers I prefer LXC for security, isolation, and compatibility with the version 4+ kernels. This will be my goto option if OpenVZ lets me down.

What do these two have that sell them to me? First, they are kernel based and unbelievably light. The highest containerization overhead I have observed did not reach 3%! I can easily throw a couple of hundred containers on a server without maxing it out. (As long as I do not run too many memory hungry Java processes!)
While LXC is not as secure or mature, the support for it is in the kernel upstream mainline. It is NOT going away, you can COUNT on it.
That they are free and fun to use goes without saying, but I did anyway. ;-)
Both can be managed entirely from the command line, but lend themselves to automation and dashboard (or Web) interfaces nicely: again with VERY low overhead.

Oops, I confused distro and kernel...

To correct my question, which distros do you folks prefer for containerization.
I have one very well reasoned vote for CentOS (now I need to learn about it)

I've moved this discussion to a dedicated thread.

--jeremy

I prefer docker-box for server containers. By using docker-box you can bring up full blown OS containers within 5-10 seconds instead of setting up virtual machines and you get all the benefits of containers like instantaneous backups(commits), easy start and stop and the awesome feature of pausing your container etc.

Those are exactly the same advantages you can obtain from proper use of LXC/LXD and OpenVZ containers. With OpenVZ7 you can now mix kernel based containers and full-V guests almost transparently, but the value to me are the containers for exactly those advantages. Deploy and destroy are very fast, migration requires less downtime than network latency delay, snapshotting, nearly instant start and stop.

I run my 4 minecraft servers in LXD containers. Love it, easy to use. Tried KVM, to much overhead. Raw LXC by itself on debian difficult to remember convoluted commands (at least compared to lxd). Works great, and I have live migration if I ever need it.

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I use LXD containers on the desktop. They are fast and you do not need to learn much new things in order to use them.

It's like having multiple computers within your desktop computer!