NixOS as hypervisor with KVM and QEMU

NixOS as a Hypervisor: KVM and QEMU Can Do Everything

People often think you need VMware, Hyper-V, or at minimum Proxmox to run a “real” hypervisor. Something with a web UI, enterprise features, the whole package. But here’s the thing: KVM with libvirt can do virtually everything those commercial hypervisors do. Live migration, memory ballooning, CPU pinning, GPU passthrough, SR-IOV, nested virtualization — it’s all there. The Linux kernel has been a production-grade hypervisor for over a decade. I run NixOS as my hypervisor. No Proxmox, no web UI, just declarative Nix configs and virsh. Let me show you what’s possible. ...

March 19, 2026 · 8 min read · Tom Meurs