LXC Containers: What They Are and When to Use Them

Virtlix supports two virtualization backends: KVM (full virtual machines, the default) and LXC (Linux containers, which share the host's kernel). Both are provisioned and managed through the same panel and API - creating, starting, stopping, rebooting, deleting, and viewing live resource stats all work identically regardless of which one a VPS uses.

Use LXC when you want more guest density per host (containers have far less overhead than a full VM) and your guests are Linux-only - a container shares the host's kernel, so it can't run a different OS family or kernel version than the host itself. Use KVM when you need genuine hardware-level isolation, Windows guests, PCI/GPU passthrough, snapshots/cloning, or console access before networking is up.

Under the hood, LXC guests use the standard lxc-* command-line tools (not LXD or Incus), with veth+bridge networking that reuses the exact same bridged/routed networks your KVM VMs already use, and cgroup v1 for CPU/memory limits. First-boot configuration (hostname, root password, SSH key, static network config) is injected directly into the container's filesystem before it ever starts, the same philosophy as cloud-init for KVM guests but adapted for a directory-based rootfs instead of a disk image.

Pick the virtualization type when creating a VPS - the OS Template dropdown filters to templates that actually support whichever type is selected.