Assessing LXC Containers on Raspberry Pi 4B/5 Boards in a Proxmox Virtual Environment

On one hand, containerization is gaining acceptance as a lightweight virtualization alternative to Virtual Machines (VMs). On the other hand, Single-Board Computers (SBCs) are increasingly used due to their affordability, versatility, low energy consumption, and growing computational power. In this work, extensive experiments were conducted to assess the capabilities and limitations of Linux Containers (LXC) when deployed on a Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) cluster, built with Raspberry Pi (RPi) computers. The clusters consisted of either two Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (RPi 4B) or two Raspberry Pi 5 (RPi 5) with identical characteristics, connected through an Ethernet switch. The experiments aimed to determine: 1) the maximum number of containers that can be run simultaneously when varying their operating system, 2) the maximum number of containers that can be executed in parallel when varying their allocated RAM, 3) the maximum number of containers that can be run concurrently under different SBC memory configurations, 4) the time for container migration, and 5) the network performance between two containers. For storage, SATA SSDs were connected to the RPi 4B boards through their USB ports, while the RPi 5 boards used NVMe SSDs connected via their PCIe interfaces. The cluster formed with RPi 5 boards outperformed the one built with RPi 4B boards, showing significant improvements in the migration experiments. In terms of network performance, the results were similar between containers running on different nodes. However, much larger differences were observed between containers in execution on the same nodes. With this study, the authors aim to assist users and researchers in identifying and selecting the technologies and configurations that best meet the performance requirements of their specific study cases.

@article{Gamess2025,
  title     = {Assessing LXC Containers on Raspberry Pi 4B/5 Boards in a Proxmox Virtual Environment},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {16},
  number    = {11},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Eric Gamess and Deuntae Winston},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0161101},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0161101}
}