Docker vs ESXi for Startup Projects - Deploying Code for Dev Testing
- by JasonG
Why hello there little programmer dude! I have a question for you and all of your experience and knowledge.
I have an ESXi whitebox that I built which is an 8 dude that sits in the corner. I made a mistake recently and took the key that had ESXi, formatted it and used it for something else. No big deal because the last project I worked on had stalled out. I'm about to pick up another project and now I need to spin up a whole bunch of stuff for CI, qa + db, ticket tracker, wikis etc etc.
I've been hearing a lot about Docker recently and as this is just a consumer grade machine, I'm wondering if it may make more sense for me to use Docker on OpenOS and then put everything there - bamboo or hudson, jira, confluence, postgress for the tools to use, then a qa env.
I can't really seem to find any documents that directly compare traditional VM infrastructure vs docker solutions and I'm wondering if it is fair to compare. Is there any reason why CoreOS w/ containers would be a strictly worse solution? Or do you have any insight into why I may want to stick with ESXi? I've looked on multiple occasions and can't find a good reason not to. I'm not going to run a production env on the server so I don't need to have HA if updating security or OS for example where esxi would allow me to restart one vm at a time. I can just shut the thing down and bring it back up if I need a reboot no problem.
So what's up with this container stuff? Is it a fair replacement for ESXi? I'm guessing the atlassian products would run much better and my ram would go a lot farther using docker. Probably the CPU would run much cooler too and my expensive HDD space would be better utilized.
