Incus

Inucs is a container manager, forked from Canonical’s LXD manager. It combines all the virtues of upstream LXD (containers + vms) with the advantages of community driven additions. You have access to the containers provided by the OCI (open container initiative) as well as being able to create VMs. It is used at the command line and includes a web interface.

Installation

Simply install a base OS on your server and add a few commands. You can install from your distro’s repo, but zabbly (the sponsor) is a bit newer.

As per https://github.com/zabbly/incus

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings/
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/keyrings/zabbly.asc https://pkgs.zabbly.com/key.asc

sudo sh -c 'cat <<EOF > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/zabbly-incus-stable.sources
Enabled: yes
Types: deb
URIs: https://pkgs.zabbly.com/incus/stable
Suites: $(. /etc/os-release && echo ${VERSION_CODENAME})
Components: main
Architectures: $(dpkg --print-architecture)
Signed-By: /etc/apt/keyrings/zabbly.asc

EOF'

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y incus incus-ui-canonical

Configuration

sudo adduser YOUR-USERNAME incus-admin
incus admin init

You’re fine to accept the defaults, though if you’re planning on a cluster consult

https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/howto/cluster_form/#cluster-form

Managing Networks

Incus uses managed networks. It creates a private bridged network by default with DHCP, DNS and NAT services. You can create others and it add services similarly. You don’t plug instances in, rather you create a new profile with no network and configure the instance with that profile.

If you’re testing DHCP though, such as when working with netboot, you must create a network without those services. That must be done at the command line with the IP spaces set to none. You can then use that in a profile

incus network create test ipv4.address=none ipv6.address=none
incus profile copy default isolated

You can proceed to the GUI for the rest.

Operation

Windows 11 VM Creation

This requires access to the TPM module and an example at the command line is extracted from https://discussion.scottibyte.com/t/windows-11-incus-virtual-machine/362.

After repacking the installation ISO you can also create through the GUI and add:

incus config device add win11vm vtpm tpm path=/dev/tpm0

Agent

sudo apt install lxd-agent

Notes

LXD is widely admired, but Canonical’s decision to move it to in-house-only led the lead developer and elements of the community to fork.