What is Virtainer?
Virtainer is an appliance-first VPS and AppVM platform aimed at small VPS provider operators, admins, and support staff. If you run hosts today with VirtFusion, SolusVM, Virtualizor, or Proxmox, the workflows will feel familiar.
The product line
Section titled “The product line”- Virtainer Lite — the standalone single-host appliance, usable now. A Fedora bootc host image ships the per-host agent, a local WebUI and API, Cloud Hypervisor, qemu-storage-daemon, image cache, storage and network setup, metrics, and VM/AppVM lifecycle on one host.
- AppVM — Docker/OCI images imported into qcow2 templates, then booted inside isolated Cloud Hypervisor VMs with container-style or persistent-disk behavior. Built for workloads that need a real kernel boundary, such as AI agents and code sandboxes; classic services like nginx work too.
- Virtainer Registry — a public image registry and REST API for Linux cloud images with download URLs and checksums, at registry.virtainer.io.
- Virtainer Basic — the next step, a central control plane for multiple hosts. Coming soon.
The appliance model
Section titled “The appliance model”The host OS image is immutable: the system ships as a Fedora bootc image,
machine configuration and state live in /etc and /var, and upgrades are
image switches through bootc with explicit stage-and-reboot behavior.
Billing and customer-facing flows stay in your existing panel (such as WHMCS); Virtainer exposes the host control plane.