FlexBox Playground
Your perfect base playground. Create purpose-built sandbox environments by choosing up to five VMs with custom root filesystems and organizing them into any number of local networks.
About This Playground
Want to build a small homelab, reproduce a distributed-system problem, or experiment with a network topology that needs more than one Linux server?
FlexBox is iximiuz Labs' general-purpose playground builder. Instead of giving you one preconfigured machine or cluster, it lets you assemble a purpose-built sandbox with up to five VMs. For each machine, you can choose the root filesystem, kernel, login user, and network settings, then connect the VMs through as many local networks as your scenario requires.
This is not a collection of containers pretending to be separate hosts. Every machine is a lightweight but fully fledged VM running on iximiuz Labs' bare-metal infrastructure. Each VM has its own kernel, root filesystem, network interfaces, and init system, so routing, firewalling, systemd, Docker, Kubernetes, and other low-level server technologies work as expected.
Use FlexBox to practice Linux networking, build multi-node clusters, test distributed applications, compare Linux distributions, or reproduce infrastructure problems that would be awkward to create locally. Put a router between two isolated networks, create a bastion host in front of a private subnet, assemble a three-tier application, provision an etcd cluster, or set up Kubernetes the hard way.
Because you control the individual machines and their connections, the playground can model roles instead of merely providing capacity: client and server, public and private host, control plane and worker, load balancer and backend, attacker and target, or any other arrangement the experiment calls for.
FlexBox provides the machines and network topology, but it does not automatically turn them into a Docker host, Kubernetes cluster, or application stack. If you need a common environment ready immediately, one of the specialized playgrounds may be a better starting point.
As with all iximiuz Labs playgrounds, FlexBox is intended for learning and short-lived experimentation—not production workloads or irreplaceable data.
For everything else, sketch the topology, start the VMs, and get your hands dirty. Configure the routes, install the software, break the communication between two machines, and troubleshoot your way back to a working system. A realistic lab doesn't have to occupy half your desk—or leave five forgotten cloud instances on your bill.
Happy hacking!
A real VM, not a container
Get root on a VM with its own kernel, so Docker, Kubernetes, and systemd just work.
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SSH from browser or CLI
Use the built-in web terminal, or connect with labctl ssh, plain ssh, scp, or rsync.
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Drive it with AI
Let Claude, Codex, or any MCP client start this playground and run commands in it.
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Expose HTTP(S) ports
Give any web app running inside the VM a public URL - for yourself or to share with others.
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Share terminals
Invite others into your terminal session, or open it yourself from another device.
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Customize with init scripts
Add shell scripts that run at boot to install packages, clone repos, or seed test data.
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Private networking
VMs reach the internet via NAT with no public IP; several VMs share bridge networks.
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Ephemeral or persistent
By default, VMs are destroyed when the session ends; enable persistence to keep the disks for next time.
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Built-in container registry
A private registry.iximiuz.com for every playground to share images across services and VMs.
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