Virtainer is now public
Virtainer Lite is now available as a free public beta: turn any Linux cloud image or Docker image into a hardware-isolated virtual machine on a single host you run yourself.
Virtainer is now public. Virtainer Lite, the single-host edition, is available today as a free beta, and you can install it on your own hardware right now.
Virtainer turns an image into a virtual machine. Give it a Linux cloud image or an OCI (Docker) image, and it runs that image as a full machine with its own kernel, its own storage, and a hardware-enforced boundary, on Linux and KVM. There is no Kubernetes, no CRI, CNI, or CSI, and no separate control plane to stand up.
Two kinds of machine
Virtainer runs two kinds of machine from one appliance:
- A VM boots a standard Linux cloud image as a normal server, with cloud-init, disks, networking, and a console.
- An AppVM takes a Docker or OCI image and boots it as its own virtual machine, with a guest kernel and an init that Virtainer wrote from scratch. Nothing runs a container engine inside the guest, so an ordinary application image gets the isolation of a real machine along with the controls you expect from a container: auto-restart, resource limits, sealed secrets, and health checks.
One host, sealed and reversible
Lite ships as a single immutable image. Your configuration and data persist, and everything else is read-only. Updating the host is an image switch that you can stage ahead of time and roll back in one reboot, so you always know which version a host is running. The whole product lives on that one host.
What is next
Today’s release is Virtainer Lite on a single host. Virtainer Basic, which adds a central layer for running more than one host as a cluster, is coming soon.
Try it
Virtainer Lite is free, and official support is free through December 31, 2027. Follow the install guide to set up your first host.