It is almost impossible to select container via Maven Profile in an IDE. IDE does not honor Surefire execution properties.

Instead of marking a container as default, e.g.

<container qualifier="foo" default="true>
</container>

Allow something like following in arquillian.xml

<default-container>foo</default-container>

With this approach foo value can be replaced with a place holder ${foo.value} and foo.value can be filtered for actual value via Maven profiles.

Note, this behavior is already implemented as extension at:

https://github.com/kpiwko/arquillian-extension-container-selector