By Ayush Pande
Publication Date: 2025-11-15 17:00:00
As a hardcore distro-hopper, I’m always on the lookout for cool operating systems to tinker with. This obsession of mine isn’t just restricted to general-purpose distributions, either. Although I adore Proxmox over all else, I’m always on the lookout for new virtualization platforms and containerization environments for my home lab.
Canonical’s MicroCloud was the most recent one I came across while doomscrolling. Truth be told, I figured it would be something like EasyNAS or XigmaNAS – a decent platform, definitely – but one that I probably wouldn’t use because of its lack of features or restrictive design (or maybe even both). But after tinkering with MicroCloud for more than a week, it has exceeded my expectations. Sure, it has its own set of problems, but it has easily become one of my favorite home lab platforms.
MicroCloud includes the essential home lab facilities
You can run both VMs and containers
Something I’ve noticed with most virtualization distributions and home lab environments is that they typically cater to VM projects and don’t ship with containerization provisions. Of course, XCP-ng supports Kubernetes via a “Hub Recipe,” and you can technically run containers inside VMs on ESXi and other home lab platforms. But aside from Proxmox, none of the typical free-to-use server distros and platforms support containers (and no, I’m not talking about Unraid,…
