Running microVMs in Proxmox VE, The Easy Way

I’ve been running a mixed Proxmox cluster for years – four nodes of wildly different capability, from an Atom x5-Z8350 with 2 GB of RAM (a z83ii, currently offline after years of faithful service as a baseline torture device) up to an i7-12700 with 128 GB (borg, my main homelab server). This year, somewhere along the way between writing agentbox and all the hype around agentic sandboxes I got tired of the eternal compromise between LXC containers and full virtual machines, and ended up building pve-microvm – a Debian package that adds QEMU’s microvm machine type as a first-class managed guest in Proxmox VE. This isn’t a quick hack. Well, the first version was, actually, but it’s gone quite a bit farther than that, and certainly farther than I expected. It now ships a custom kernel, patches the Perl internals to provide Proxmox web UI integration, and, due to my usual fascination with offbeat operating systems, ended up supporting (as of this writing) 21 guest OS types from Debian to…