VM Overview

Carolina Cloud VMs are full KVM/QEMU virtual machines running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Each VM gets its own kernel, dedicated NVMe storage, and a public IPv4 address assigned automatically.

When to use a VM

VMs are the right choice when you need:

Full kernel control — custom kernel modules, system-level daemons, Docker-in-Docker, or anything that requires systemd and root-level OS access.
A public IPv4 address — VMs receive a public IP automatically. Open specific ports or all ports via the dashboard or API.
Maximum isolation — KVM provides hardware-level isolation. Your VM is a separate operating system, not a process on a shared kernel.
Persistent services — web servers, databases, CI runners, or any long-running daemon that needs to survive reboots.

VM vs. Container

	VM	Container
Isolation	Full KVM/QEMU hypervisor	LXC (shared kernel)
OS	Ubuntu 24.04 with own kernel	Ubuntu-based, shared host kernel
Public IPv4	Assigned automatically	Not available
Flavors	`base` only	base, genomics, plaingenomics, datascience, marimo, datasciencemarimo, rstudioserver, rgeospatial
Live resize	Not supported	CPU and RAM can be changed without restart
GPU	Not available	Available (NVIDIA)
Overhead	~5-10% hypervisor overhead	Near bare-metal performance
Boot time	~30-60 seconds	~5-15 seconds

What you get

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with root access
Python 3.12, build essentials, common system packages
SSH access via login.carolinacloud.io or directly via public IP
NVMe storage — local to the host, bare-metal I/O performance
Public IPv4 with configurable firewall ports

Resource limits

Resource	Min	Max
vCPUs	1	256
RAM	1 GiB	512 GiB
Disk	10 GiB	2,000 GiB

CPU tiers

General Purpose — AMD EPYC 7000 series processors. Good for most workloads.
High Performance — AMD Threadripper 7000 / EPYC 9000 series with 5+ GHz boost clocks. Recommended for single-threaded and latency-sensitive workloads.

Both tiers are priced identically.