No they are not. A VM is a completely different system, while a container is a packaged application.
VM's provide an awful lot more than just resource separation... security and isolation being at the top of the list.
The problem we see here is an awful lot of people think a container is a drop-in replacement for a VM, when it is usually not.
I think you have a misunderstanding of terms here, possibly confused by all the fuzz around Docker. A container is nothing more then a virtualization technology on OS level[1]. What you are talking about is something like rkt, which is how to run an app inside a container[2]. From the point of your app there is no difference between a VM, OpenVZ or LXC.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating-system-level_virtual...
[2] https://github.com/coreos/rkt/blob/master/Documentation/app-...
Rocket, and Docker, yes.
> I think you have a misunderstanding of terms here, possibly confused by all the fuzz around Docker
I agree Docker has spread a lot of FUD, causing great confusion about what Docker can do, but also what containers are.
> A container is nothing more then a virtualization technology on OS level[
Not quite. A container was intended to be the first (for linux) truly portable application. You create an application, "containerize" it, then you can run that application on any system with minimal effort (Ubuntu app running on CentOS, etc).
Containers are not virtualizing anything, and that is the entire point. They remove the virtualization/emulation overhead of a hypervisor and instead run your application at native speed on the native system.
Docker has tried to make a do-all application which then provides process isolation and other things to add "Security", but at the end of the day, an app running in a container on your system can still negatively impact other containers and/or the host OS (if your container needs to read/write to /etc for example).
In a VM, everything is isolated because it's literally it's own OS running on (what it thinks is) it's own hardware. An app can destroy the VM, or the VM can be exploited, but nothing outside the VM can be effected.
Xen/KVM have zero comparison to things like Rocket, and Docker.
