As part of a container initialization procedure, a maximum number of hardware threads per processor core in a set of cores of a computer system are enabled, the container initialization procedure configuring an operating system executing on the computer system for container execution and configuring a first container for execution on the operating system. From a set of available cores in the set of cores, an execution core is selected. In the selected execution core, a number of threads per core to be used during execution of the first container is configured, the number of threads per core specified for the container initialization procedure by a first simultaneous multithreading (SMT) parameter. Using the configured execution core, the first container is executed, the executing virtualizing the operating system.