Almost a month after its previous 6.5 release, Incus, an open-source container and virtual machine manager, released its latest update, version 6.6.
While this release is slightly less busy due to the team’s participation in the Linux Plumbers Conference, it still brings a wealth of new features and improvements that are far from boring. Here they are.
Incus 6.6 Highlights
To begin with, the Incus VM agent now provides additional details about virtual machines. This includes operating system information, kernel version, hostname, and fully qualified domain name.
This enhancement is currently available for virtual machines, as containers don’t run an agent, and directly fetching this information could be unsafe.
Furthermore, console access for virtual machines has been improved. Previously, virtual machines lacked the non-interactive text log feature available to containers.
Now, by leveraging a new method in QEMU, Incus allows you to use incus console --show-log with virtual machines, providing access to console history even when you’re not connected interactively.
In addition, Incus now allows you to create clustered Logical Volume Manager (LVM) volume groups directly without requiring manual pre-creation. This streamlines the setup process for clustered environments.
The incus-migrate tool has also been enhanced to import existing QCOW2 and VMDK virtual machines. By leveraging qemu-img, the tool handles conversion seamlessly, simplifying the migration of virtual machines into Incus.
Moreover, Incus now allows customization of the macvlan mode. Previously fixed to bridged, you can now choose other modes such as vepa, passthru, and private, providing greater flexibility in network configurations.
With the recent addition of health monitoring to OVN load balancers, the API now exposes this health information. This allows administrators to check the status of backend services easily.
It’s also worth mentioning that attaching an external physical interface on a specific server to a virtual OVN network is now possible. This bridges the gap between physical and virtual networking, enhancing connectivity options.
Lastly, cluster evacuation and restoration processes are now parallelized. This significantly reduces the time required, especially in clusters with a large number of instances. The process automatically scales, adding an extra parallel migration per 16 CPU threads.
Users are encouraged to try out these new features by visiting the Incus online platform, which provides a hands-on experience with the latest version.
For more information about the Incus 6.6 container and virtual machine manager changes, visit the release announcement or check out the full changelog.
