It depends on your point of view. Apparently, on macos, Docker can make use of the macos virtualisation framework, which runs the containerised OS on top of a v

It depends on your point of view. Apparently, on macos, Docker can make use of the macos virtualisation framework, which runs the containerised OS on top of a virtualised kernel. That said, if you specifically need to run a specific full operating system, then yes, something like VMWare or Parallels is likely to be more appropriate. The key question is - why do you want full VMs? For example, you can use a Ubuntu base image and then use apt to install any other packages you need in order to get a full virtual server running. I think it would be worth your while to go through the Docker tutorials to get a sense of what it is capable of.