Proxmox in Docker Sounds Wrong, Which Is Why Everyone Watched
Some projects arrive with a clean pitch. Others kick the door open wearing a fake mustache and ask the room to explain why it's mad, and "Proxmox in a Docker container" is very much the second kind. The idea is simple enough: package Proxmox VE so it can run on an existing system through Docker, letting people test the platform without dedicating a whole machine to it. The creator framed it as a low-friction playground for newcomers, especially people who already understand Docker but haven't touched Proxmox yet. The crowd reacted the way you might if someone put a hypervisor inside a lunchbox.
The joke wrote itself immediately
The funniest replies understood the assignment before anyone got serious. One person basically yelled, "Look how they massacred my boy," which captured the emotional damage some Proxmox users felt on sight. Another called it "Proxception," because of course they did. Someone else asked how deep the nesting could go: Proxmox inside Docker, inside a Debian VM, inside Proxmox, inside Docker, inside another VM, all sitting on hardware Proxmox. Nobody expected an answer. It was the sound of a homelab brain seeing a forbidden staircase and sprinting toward it.
That meme energy mattered because it lowered the temperature. People were mocking the project, and they were also fascinated by it. The whole thing had the same appeal as running Doom on a printer or Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi powered by spite. Is it sensible? Maybe not. Is it educational? Almost certainly. Some engineering curiosity starts with "this feels wrong" and ends with a surprisingly useful tool, and the comments were full of that tension: disgust, laughter, and a little bit of "wait, could this actually work?"
The useful part is almost too obvious
Strip away the horror-movie framing and the pitch makes sense. Proxmox usually asks for a dedicated machine or at least a proper install environment. That's fine for people who already own spare hardware, but it's a wall for newcomers, and a Dockerized Proxmox lowers the entry barrier. Spin up a container, poke around the UI, understand the workflow, break things, delete the container, and start again. For someone coming from Docker, that feels natural. For someone trying to decide whether Proxmox deserves a real host, it's a cheap test drive.
The creator also made a bold performance claim: virtual machines should perform like a normal bare-metal install because they access the host's KVM kernel module directly, without an extra virtualization layer in between. That detail moved the project from "funny cursed experiment" to "huh, maybe." A few people started wondering what else could be done with it. Could you run a three-node Proxmox cluster as containers on one machine? Could it be a training lab, or a demo environment for docs, videos, or classrooms? Suddenly the cursed lunchbox had a job.
The purists had a point
Still, the discomfort was real. Proxmox is supposed to be the thing underneath your workloads, and here it becomes one more container in the pile. It manages storage, networking, VMs, containers, clusters, backups, and a lot of host-level behavior, so putting it inside Docker sounds like inviting two control planes to fight over the steering wheel. Even if the project works technically, people are right to ask where the boundaries are. What happens with networking quirks, device access, storage assumptions, upgrades, security, and support expectations? Nobody wants a beginner to confuse a clever test environment with a production deployment.
That's where the skeptical camp felt grounded. One commenter joked about running it inside a Debian LXC, then Docker, then another Proxmox, then another LXC, "and keep going down the waterslide and see where it finally breaks." It's a joke, and also a warning. Nesting infrastructure can teach you a lot, but it can also create problems so weird they don't fit into normal documentation. When the platform itself sits inside another abstraction, every failure gets a little harder to explain, and the stack trace becomes a family tree.
The homelab crowd secretly loves this stuff
The people laughing at it are exactly the people most likely to try it. Homelab culture runs on practical needs, yes, but also on beautifully unnecessary experiments. Someone mentioned wanting NixOS in the mix. Another escalated the bit to rootless Podman. Someone recalled old attempts to run VMs in ESXi under VirtualBox under Windows, which apparently did not go well. This project belongs to that lineage of late-night "what happens if I do this?" energy, a long way from enterprise architecture diagrams.
That's fine, because a lot of serious infrastructure knowledge starts as nonsense. You learn where KVM lives and what Docker can and can't isolate. You learn why storage passthrough matters, why networking gets weird, why privileged containers are powerful and scary, and why "it boots" is not the same as "I trust it with my data." A Dockerized Proxmox box probably isn't the future of production virtualization. As a teaching tool, a demo system, or a way to let curious people click around without repartitioning a machine, though, it has a real lane.
The cursed demo might be the best gateway drug
The emotional split makes perfect sense. To long-time Proxmox users, this feels like putting the foundation of a house on roller skates. To Docker-native newcomers, it feels like a friendly front door. To the chaos engineers in the back, it's an invitation to build an infrastructure matryoshka doll until something screams. All three reactions are valid. The project is weird and clever at once, and it should probably come with a giant "not for production unless you know exactly what pain you're buying" sticker.
The strongest idea here is about access. People try tools when the first step is easy, and a container they can run, inspect, destroy, and rebuild is less scary than wiping a spare machine or setting up nested virtualization by hand. So yes, some users will keep clutching their pearls, and others will keep posting memes. Somewhere, though, a newcomer is going to run this, learn what Proxmox does, and eventually install it properly on real hardware. The "massacre" turns out to be a surprisingly effective onboarding funnel wearing a clown nose.