Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Proxmox VE 7.x or 8.x (tested with 8.3.3)
• Python 3.10+ (the daemon does not start on 3.9)
• Root access to the Proxmox host
• LXC containers already created and configured

Installation

Run the install script on the Proxmox host:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fabriziosalmi/proxmox-lxc-autoscale/main/install.sh | bash

Verify the service is running:

systemctl status lxc_autoscale.service

Example output:

root@proxmox:~# systemctl status lxc_autoscale.service
● lxc_autoscale.service - LXC AutoScale Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/lxc_autoscale.service; enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2024-08-19 01:38:07 CEST; 7s ago
   Main PID: 40462 (python3)
     Memory: 9.1M
     CGroup: /system.slice/lxc_autoscale.service
             └─40462 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/lxc_autoscale/lxc_autoscale.py

How it works

Each polling cycle (default: 300 seconds):

1. Collect — CPU and memory usage is read for each running container via host-side cgroup accounting.
2. Evaluate — Usage is compared against the container's tier thresholds (or global defaults).
3. Scale — If usage exceeds the upper threshold, cores/memory are added. If below the lower threshold, they are reduced.
4. Pin — If cpu_pinning is configured, the container is pinned to the specified CPU cores.
5. Log — All scaling events are logged (plain text and JSON) and optionally sent as notifications.

Resource measurement

CPU and memory usage are both read from host-side cgroup accounting (cgroup v2 with v1 fallback). This reads the kernel's own resource tracking directly from the Proxmox host without executing commands inside containers.

Benefits:

• Accurate measurements matching the Proxmox web UI
• No dependency on LXCFS
• Minimal overhead (file reads instead of pct exec)
• Correct results on low-core hosts with many containers
• First measurement cycle is non-blocking (no 2-second sleep)

If cgroup accounting is unavailable, the daemon falls back to /proc/stat for CPU (requires LXCFS) and /proc/meminfo via pct exec for memory.

Backends

LXC AutoScale supports two backends for communicating with Proxmox:

Backend	Config value	How it works	Requirements
CLI (default)	backend: cli	Executes pct commands locally or via SSH	Root access (local) or SSH credentials (remote)
REST API	backend: api	Calls the Proxmox REST API via HTTP	pip install proxmoxer, API token

The CLI backend is the only one. A REST implementation was present in the tree but never connected to the daemon, and has been removed; backend: api is refused at startup. Tracked as #56.

See Configuration for backend setup details.

Next steps

• Configuration — YAML settings reference
• Tiers — per-container scaling rules
• CPU Core Pinning — L3/CCD and NUMA groups on any CPU, P/E cores on hybrid Intel
• Security — SSH hardening, secret masking, API tokens
• Docker — run the daemon in a container