LXC from the Ubuntu Server Guide by OnWorks

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6. LXC‌

Containers are a lightweight virtualization technology. They are more akin to an enhanced chroot than to full virtualization like Qemu or VMware, both because they do not emulate hardware and because containers share the same operating system as the host. Containers are similar to Solaris zones or BSD jails. Linux- vserver and OpenVZ are two pre-existing, independently developed implementations of containers-like functionality for Linux. In fact, containers came about as a result of the work to upstream the vserver and OpenVZ functionality.

There are two user-space implementations of containers, each exploiting the same kernel features. Libvirt allows the use of containers through the LXC driver by connecting to 'lxc:///'. This can be very convenient as it supports the same usage as its other drivers. The other implementation, called simply 'LXC', is not compatible with libvirt, but is more flexible with more userspace tools. It is possible to switch between the two, though there are peculiarities which can cause confusion.

In this document we will mainly describe the lxc package. Use of libvirt-lxc is not generally recommended due to a lack of Apparmor protection for libvirt-lxc containers.

In this document, a container name will be shown as CN, C1, or C2.