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Comment by hsin003 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing! We’re definitely aware that Incus + Proxmox are very mature and full-featured.

Containarium is more of a "purpose-built, single-VM, SSH-first dev environment" approach:

- Lightweight: 1 VM can host 50–100+ LXC containers - Quick provisioning: seconds instead of minutes per environment - Focused on SSH workflows and dev sandboxing, not full datacenter management - Minimal infra overhead: no GUI, no HA cluster required

Tradeoffs we’re aware of: - Shared kernel (not VM-level isolation) - Linux-only - Less built-in tooling compared to Proxmox

We designed it to *optimize for cost efficiency and rapid dev onboarding*, rather than full-featured virtualization.

Would love to hear if you see any pitfalls with this approach compared to using Proxmox/Incus in a single-host scenario!

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This reads like an AI-generated reply. It repeats the points which are already present in Incus/Proxmox and doesn't directly address the question.

Sorry, we want to understand your use case better. Did you provision *one VM via Proxmox* and then run *multiple users via Incus* inside it?

We’re curious how you handled provisioning, isolation, and resource limits in your setup. More importantly, what’s the maximum scale you’ve been able to push?

Why would I need a VM? I just install Proxmox on a computer/server and then create as many containers as I need. No VMs at all. VM is a waste.

A VM is more robust as a security boundary than a container is. Still not as good as independent physical hardware but certainly worthwhile.

We're not talking VM vs containers. We're talking VM vs no VM at all in base system.

I understand that. I'm saying that wrapping all the dev containers up inside a single VM serves to further protect the host system from the dev containers.

That's because it is, just like how this entire project is.

In fact, it is just using the same technologies as LXC and Incus. (It is exactly LXC and Incus)

So really nothing special at all. Perhaps people looked at the title and rushed to the repo.

When I saw "IMPLEMENTATION-PLAN.md" and "SECURITY-CHECKLIST.md" filled with hundreds of emojis, I immediately closed the tab and now replying to you that it is total slop.

2026 is the year of abundant "not invented here syndrome".

Containarium does indeed build on LXC/Incus and isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. If you’ve run multi-tenant sandboxes at scale, we’d love to hear what pitfalls or limitations you’ve seen.

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