Work · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to SSH-hypervisor – like SSH, but each user gets their own microVM

This is a project I made over the weekend. What if when you SSH'd into a machine, instead of giving you a user login, it would provision a new microVM just for you? It's like a little SimCity for VMs. This turned out to be a lot of fun, and I've wanted to make my own custom SSH server for a while now, with its fancy progress bars and color animations. The hardest part was definitely debugging VM setup, boot, and networking though! Compiling the Linux kernel with all the right configs was difficult. For a while I had issues with silent hangs on boot due to lack of available system entropy, on…

SSH-hypervisor is a custom SSH server that provisions a lightweight microVM for each user who connects, rather than providing a traditional shell login. Built as a weekend project, it bundles a Linux kernel… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1. 1
   Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking▲311

   I wanted to see how fast an isolated code sandbox could start if I never had to boot a fresh VM. So instead of launching a new microVM per execution, I boot Firecracker once with Python and numpy already loaded, then snapshot the full VM state. Every execution after that creates a new KVM VM backed by a `MAP_PRIVATE` mapping of the snapshot memory, so Linux gives me copy-on-write pages automatically. That means each sandbox starts from an already-running Python process inside a real VM, runs the code, and exits. These are real KVM VMs, not containers: separate guest kernel, separate guest…

   Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

2. 2SA
   Shhhbb, an SSH BBS▲188

   Hello all :) I made this BBS for fun and thought you all would enjoy it. It's not perfect, but it's been a fun exercise! see it: https://asciinema.org/a/Emg6SWrXMV6cehfQxrw1GRu75 try it: ssh -p 2223 shhhbb.com host it: https://github.com/donuts-are-good/shhhbb/releases/latest why? Every year I challenge myself in some new way, this year it is to push one project per week. You might recognize my static site generator [0] or my releaser for go [1] from previous posts as one of these weekly projects. If you want to join me in doing this, it's…

   2023 · donuts-are-good.github.io · its alternatives →

3. 3
   microvm – a minimalist machine type for QEMU inspired by Firecracker▲145

   2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

4. 4
   Wiser – minimal hypervisor boots Linux VM, written in C▲136

   :racehorse: Extremely minimal vmm for linux written in C. Hopefully someday will spin linux-vm for you. - flouthoc/wiser

   2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

5. 5
   VVTerm▲80

   Ghostty-powered SSH client for iOS, iPad, MacOS.

   Feb 2026 · vvterm.com · its alternatives →

6. 6
   HiddenVM – Use any desktop OS without leaving a trace▲429

   HiddenVM — Use any desktop OS without leaving a trace. - aforensics/HiddenVM

   2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

7. 7
   A small virtual machine written in C▲212

   "interesting" VM in C. Let's see how this goes. Contribute to tekknolagi/carp development by creating an account on GitHub.

   2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

8. 8
   Hyper – distributed Firecracker microVM orchestrator written in Elixir▲5

   Hey everyone! One of the problems I ran into is that a large part of the VM-provider ecosystem is currently paid closed-source SAAS products with varying degrees of reliability. I wanted an OSS distributed microVM orchestrator and I couldn't find one. Hyper is a distributed FirecrackerVM orchestrator written in Elixir (BEAM), with gRPC support for non-BEAM clients. Hyper is: - Distributed -- it's designed to run across a cluster of bare metal machines, and will automatically connect to other Hyper nodes. - Fast -- it builds COW layers to enable fast, localized COW forking. Cold boots happen…

   Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

9. 9
   My microkernel-based OS built from scratch now has basic Unix commands▲69

   This project contains no code from Linux, BSD, Minix, or any other OS. Everything up until this point is written entirely from scratch, including a pure microkernel (that only implements multiprocessor priority scheduling, memory management, and interprocess communication), a work-in-progress implementation of the standard C library, and a variety of servers that provide drivers and other essential OS functionality. At the time of writing this post, the servers provide drivers for the keyboard, NVMe SSDs (that works on real hardware), a Unix-like virtual file system (with a single root…

   2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

10. 10
    Second State VM▲78

    High performance secure & portable Rust functions in Node.js

    2020 · secondstate.io · its alternatives →

11. 11LV
    Launch VM workloads securely and instantaneously, without VMs▲12

    Hello HN! We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. This is still a WIP, but we wanted to give the community an idea about our approach, its benefits, and various use cases it unlocks. Today, VMs are used to host containers, and make up for the lack of strong security as well as kernel isolation in containers. This work adds this missing security piece in containers. We plan on launching a free private beta soon. Meanwhile, we'd deeply appreciate any feedback, and happy to answer any questions here or on our slack…

    2021 · its alternatives →

12. 12
    SecurSSH▲57

    SSH access for developers. Secure, European, done right.

    May 2026 · securssh.com · its alternatives →

13. 13
    Tiny type-2 Linux hypervisor built using Linux/KVM. In in C▲18

    :racehorse: Extremely minimal vmm for linux written in C. Hopefully someday will spin linux-vm for you. - flouthoc/wiser

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

14. 14
    Ksm – a lightweight hypervisor for Windows (eptp vmfunc+idt shadow)▲12

    A fast, hackable and simple x64 VT-x hypervisor for Windows and Linux. Builtin userspace sandbox and introspection engine. - asamy/ksm

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

15. 15WB
    We built a Cloud-Managed Hypervisor to fix running on-prem servers▲10

    We’ve been building a Cloud-Managed Hypervisor that makes running applications on your own servers as effortless as the public cloud. Over my career I’ve watched the transition from on-prem to public cloud. The cloud paradigm shift is as much about empowering engineers as it is about elastic infrastructure, but the tooling for on-prem and private clouds is at best heavyweight and at worst stuck in the last century. We've tackled some interesting problems in the process of building this, such as providing a cloud-style metadata service from our platform. We’d love for you to read our story…

    2023 · gallium.cloud · its alternatives →

16. 16
    Anos – a hand-written ~100KiB microkernel for x86-64 and RISC-V▲115

    I pretty much always have a kernel project going on, and have been that way for decades. Over the past couple of years, that's been Anos, which has gotten further along than any of my previous hobby kernels, supporting IPC, multitasking, SMP (x86-64 only right now) and running on real hardware. LLMs (mostly Claude Code) have been used during development, but I learned early on that it's not _great_ at code at this level, so I've restricted its use to mostly documentation and tests. There's _a little_ AI code in the user space, but I have a strict "no AI code" rule in the kernel itself. I…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

17. 17
    Ephemeral VMs in 1 Microsecond▲84

    Contribute to libriscv/drogon-sandbox development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

18. 18
    npm i -g hotcell▲97

    Hi HN! Sina here. i wanted to share this open source project (apache 2.0) that i've been working on for the past month or so. it's called hotcell and it lets you create/pause/manage sandboxes on any device (your laptop, linux vm, bare metal). i've tested it against various benchmarks that i found on computesdk (https://www.computesdk.com/benchmarks/sandboxes/) as well as the one shared by dax (cofounder of open code) on twitter recently (link to his original thread and my reply https://x.com/sinasanm/status/2078158598996443346) and…

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

19. 19
    Tarit – a hypervisor which is 2x faster than firecracker▲12

    We have built Tarit as a hypervisor built from ground up for running AI agent and RL environments. It is based on rust-vmm and can be used as a replacement for firecracker. Firecracker was built to serve a different need of primarily serverless compute and hence does not have primitives like live snapshots without pausing the VM operations. We also provide a basic orchestrator that handles placement of the microVMs, creating clusters with HA, maintaining a warm pool of VMs, and takes care of setting up networking and monitoring. Our benchmarks on a metal instance shows an acquire VM from…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

20. 20
    krunvm – Create and run lightweight VMs from OCI images▲82

    Create microVMs from OCI images. Contribute to slp/krunvm development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

21. 21
    BVisor – An Embedded Bash Sandbox, 2ms Boot, Written in Zig▲24

    bVisor is an SDK and runtime for safely executing bash commands directly on your host machine. We built it on the belief that "sandbox" doesn't need to mean shipping off to remote sandbox products, or spinning up local VMs / containers. Sometimes, you just want to run that bash command locally. bVisor boots a sandbox from user-space without special permissions, powered by seccomp user notifier. This allows us to intercept syscalls from guest processes and selectively virtualize them to block privilege escalation, isolate process visibility, and keep filesystem changes isolated per…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

22. 22
    Slim 2: Create VM from Dockerfile, boots in seconds (+macOS M1/Hyper-V)▲59

    Build and run tiny vms from Dockerfiles. Small and sleek. - GitHub - ottomatica/slim at 2.x

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

23. 23
    Use BIOS ram hacks to make an SSH server for MS-DOS, INT 10 13h OS's▲65

    Use BIOS ram hacks to make a SSH server out of any INT 10 13h app (MS-DOS is one of those) - benjojo/dos_ssh

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

24. 24BI
    Bastion – isolated Linux VMs for background coding agents▲32

    Self-hosted virtual machines for background coding agents.

    Jun 2026 · bastion.computer · its alternatives →

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →