After over a year of work, I’m very excited to announce the general availability of IncusOS, our own immutable OS image designed from the ground up to run Incus!
IncusOS is designed for the modern world, actively relying on both UEFI Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 for boot security and for full disk encryption. It’s a very locked down environment, both for security and for general reliability. There is no local or remote shell, everything must be done through the (authenticated) Incus API.
Under the hood, it’s built on a minimal Debian 13 base, using the Zabbly builds of both the Linux kernel, ZFS and Incus, providing the latest stable versions of all of those. We rely a lot on the systemd tooling to handle image builds (mkosi), application installation (sysext), system updates (sysupdate) and a variety of other things from network configuration to partitioning.
I recorded a demo video of its installation and basic usage both in a virtual machine and on physical hardware:
And as always, my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship. You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus
Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.
Besides my regular open source contributions and running my own consulting business (Zabbly), I’m also the CTO and co-founder of an Open Source company called FuturFusion where I’ve been running Engineering for well over a year now.
My main focus over there has been building the FuturFusion Cloud stack, a completely open-source private cloud solution built around Incus. As part of that, our engineering team has been hard at work over the past year or so, improving Incus itself but also building a number of other projects from the ground up to make it easy to build and operate large scale Incus deployments.
Our stack is made of 4 core components:
Incus itself as the private cloud platform that runs virtual machines, system containers and application containers, with full clustering and multi-tenancy as well as support for a variety of storage and networking options to fit most environments.
IncusOS (shipping as HypervisorOS to our customers) that acts as our base layer Operating System image running on all physical servers as well as in the virtual machines that run our other components. It’s an immutable OS image based on Debian 13 and using systemd’s tooling to provide a safe boot experience and full disk encryption through the use of UEFI Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 modules. It uses an A/B update scheme, guaranteeing no variance in software between servers and an easy rollback mechanism should something go wrong. It’s completely locked down with API-only access and optional central management through Operations Center.
Operations Centerprovides an overview of an entire deployment, keeping track of all individual servers (running HypervisorOS), centrally managing all updates, handling Incus cluster creation and then acting as a global inventory of every Incus resource across all clusters.
Migration Manageris our migration tool which currently focuses on migrating from VMware (vCenter or standalone ESXi) over to Incus. It can connect to a large number of source VMware environments as well as target Incus clusters. It can easily keep track of hundreds of thousands of VMs that need to be migrated, making it easy to create migration batches and schedule those over weeks or months, running regular data pre-migration and finally completing the migration during scheduled downtime windows.
I recently took a bit of time away from customer deployments to record a video of how everything fits together, including an end to end lab deployment, starting from a pre-existing VMware environment and going all the way to having two Incus clusters running and the VMware VMs fully converted to Incus VMs.
In addition, for those interested in the security aspect of things, I gave a talk a few months back about IncusOS’ security story at the Linux Security Summit in Denver, Colorado. The recording of which has since been made publicly available.
Now our focus on the engineering front is primarily in fixing some filling a few remaining gaps as well as putting together up to date comprehensive documentation on IncusOS, Migration Manager and Operations Center. This will then make it easy for anyone to get started with those as well as hopefully attract more contributors to those projects.
On the topic of contributors, none of this would have been possible without the 112 individuals who contributed to the Incus project in the past year, thank you!
The Incus team is pleased to announce the release of Incus 6.17!
This release comes with an early CLI for IncusOS users, a couple of nice enhancements to OVN networking, more flexibility for cluster users and a couple of new instance options.
The highlights for this release are:
IncusOS management commands
Tunnel support on OVN networks
Control over out-of-memory priority
Override-able configuration and devices on backup import
database-client cluster role
Support for parent=none on OVN uplink networks
Cluster groups in configuration preseed
The full announcement and changelog can be found here. And for those who prefer videos, here’s the release overview video:
And as always, my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship. You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus
Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.
The Incus team is pleased to announce the release of Incus 6.16!
This release brings in a new storage driver, the ability to install Windows VMs without having to rely on a repacked ISO and support for temporary storage in containers.
The highlights for this release are:
TrueNAS storage driver
USB CD-ROM handling for VMs
tmpfs and tmpfs-overlay disks for containers
Configurable console behavior in the CLI
The full announcement and changelog can be found here. And for those who prefer videos, here’s the release overview video:
And as always, my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship. You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus
Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.
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