Incus 6.22 Container & Virtual Machine Manager Released

The team behind Incus has released version 6.22 of their container and virtual machine management platform. This project is a community-led fork of LXD, created after governance changes around LXD prompted by Canonical.

One of the headline improvements is full vsock support for Windows VMs. With signed Virtio vsock drivers and Go integration on Windows, communication between Windows virtual machines now uses vsock rather than TCP. This brings Windows behavior in line with Linux and makes management easier when VM IP addresses are not accessible.

Backup operations have been enhanced with direct streaming. Commands such as incus export can now transfer data directly, eliminating temporary disk usage and lowering storage demands.

Snapshot handling is more flexible, too. Administrators can perform disk-only restores, recovering the storage state of a virtual machine without altering its configuration or runtime metadata.

Storage functionality sees several improvements. Support for QCOW2 has been expanded, custom block volumes now default to QCOW2 formatting, and snapshot management is more robust. Users of lvmcluster gain the ability to resize storage pools and optionally remove newer snapshots when rolling back older ones.

Cluster management is clearer with added member states such as EVACUATING and RESTORING, and nodes can now be restored without automatically migrating instances back.

The incus-migrate tool now accepts URL-based image imports, allowing direct ingestion of remote QCOW2 or VMDK files. ACME certificates have been updated to handle multiple domains using a comma-separated list for HTTPS setups.

Other improvements include full USB controller passthrough via unix-hotplug, a security.trusted option for SR-IOV NICs, dedicated log volumes, expanded certificate details in authorization scripts, project-level image server restrictions, and new instance boot-time metrics.

For hands-on exploration of these features, users can access the Incus online platform, which lets you try the latest release in a live environment.

For more information about the Incus 6.22 container and virtual machine manager changes, visit the release announcement or check out the full changelog.