The Incus team has just announced the release of version 6.20 of its container & virtual machine manager, a community-driven fork of LXD, created after Canonical changed LXD’s governance and moved it under its umbrella.
A key improvement in Incus 6.20 is reliable virtual machine snapshot support on clustered LVM. Previous limitations in LVM cluster implementations prevented reliable snapshots and interfered with live migration due to activation-mode restrictions. To address this, Incus now formats new clustered LVM volumes using QCOW2 instead of raw.
This change enables the creation of consistent snapshot chains reflecting the correct VM state. Existing VMs on raw formats remain unchanged and do not support snapshots; administrators can convert them by migrating the instance to a different storage pool and back.
The release also adds a standalone incus cluster join command to simplify adding new nodes to an existing cluster. In environments like IncusOS, where all interactions occur remotely via the Incus command line or UI, joining additional servers was previously complex.
The new command accepts the existing cluster and target server as arguments, prompts for configuration details analogous to incus admin init, and integrates the new server into the cluster.
On top of that, Incus 6.20 introduces a configuration file for the VM agent that restricts available actions. By listing enabled features in the system configuration, administrators can disable all agent functionality unless explicitly allowed, strengthening operational security.
Finally, networking improvements include automatic generation of reverse DNS records for instances running on OVN. In addition to standard forward DNS, reverse entries improve name resolution and operational diagnostics.
For more information about the Incus 6.20 container and virtual machine manager changes, visit the release announcement or check out the full changelog.
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.
