Just a couple clarification questions

[bilbo6209]

If I am reading, and seeing in my building of VMs correctly...... KVM is not able to share memory and CPU between VMs and dockers effectively?

 

Esxi was very good at this, for example you could assign 4 VMs 4 cores on an 8 core cpu and allow each 12gb out of 32 gb of ram and VMware would balance everything out. Yes if all VMs were being used heavy they would slow down because they couldn't get the cpu and ram they wanted but most of the time none of the VMs used any where near what they were allocated to but you always gave them extra just in case.

 

KVM seems more like you assign each a max and then it isn't shared with others period, is this correct?

[itimpi]

There is no issue with sharing CPU between unRAID, Dockers and VM's.  You can pin VM's to be constrained to only use certain cores but that is a completely different issue.

 

RAM is not shared.  This is not surprising considering that unRAID runs with no swap (or paging) file and a swap file is virtually mandatory if you want to vitualize RAM. 

 

I would guess this is much less of an issue than it used to be as RAM is much cheaper.  Having said that I think this would only really be an issue with VM's (which have full OS installs), and not Docker containers.  Docker containers do not have a full OS inside each of them as they all run on the unRAID linux kernel and are thus much less resource hungry. That is one of their atractions as a technology.  I have seen reports of people running unRAID with a significant number of Dockers quite happily in a 2GB system.