Not running a Proxmox system, would it be possible to setup something similar directly with QEMU?

One of my Proxmox hosts is glacially slow at running VMs. (Dell R520; I have a same-generation server that is fine at VMs, so not sure what the root cause is). I wonder if this would help performance.

Tangentially, in theory, k3s + kubevirt + microvms sounds like the optimal combination for lightweight but isolated deployment. Does anyone have experience with that?

I'm curious if there's more than one way to achieve this.

Creating a single VM, with vm within vm (performance hit would be negligible for the orchestration work of agents), and it might offer some alternatives without having to customize Proxmox as much?

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