This is the second blog post in this series about LXD 2.0.

Where to get LXD and how to install it

There are many ways to get the latest and greatest LXD. We recommend you use LXD with the latest LXC and Linux kernel to benefit from all its features but we try to degrade gracefully where possible to support older Linux distributions.

The Ubuntu archive

All new releases of LXD get uploaded to the Ubuntu development release within a few minutes of the upstream release. That package is then used to seed all the other source of packages for Ubuntu users.

If you are using the Ubuntu development release (16.04), you can simply do:

sudo apt install lxd

If you are running Ubuntu 14.04, we have backport packages available for you with:

sudo apt -t trusty-backports install lxd

The Ubuntu Core store

Users of Ubuntu Core on the stable release can install LXD with:

sudo snappy install lxd.stgraber

The official Ubuntu PPA

Users of other Ubuntu releases such as Ubuntu 15.10 can find LXD packages in the following PPA (Personal Package Archive):

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt install lxd

The Gentoo archive

Gentoo has pretty recent LXD packages available too, you can install those with:

sudo emerge --ask lxd

From source

Building LXD from source isn’t very difficult if you are used to building Go projects. Note however that you will need the LXC development headers. In order to run LXD, your distribution also needs a recent Linux kernel (3.13 at least), recent LXC (1.1.5 or higher), LXCFS and a version of shadow that supports user sub-uid/gid allocations.

The latest instructions on building LXD from source can be found in the upstream README.

Networking on Ubuntu

The Ubuntu packages provide you with a “lxdbr0” bridge as a convenience. This bridge comes unconfigured by default, offering only IPv6 link-local connectivity through an HTTP proxy.

To reconfigure the bridge and add some IPv4 or IPv6 subnet to it, you can run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -p medium lxd

Or go through the whole LXD step by step setup (see below) with:

sudo lxd init

Storage backends

LXD supports a number of storage backends. It’s best to know what backend you want to use prior to starting to use LXD as we do not support moving existing containers or images between backends.

A feature comparison table of the different backends can be found here.

ZFS

Our recommendation is ZFS as it supports all the features LXD needs to offer the fastest and most reliable container experience. This includes per-container disk quotas, immediate snapshot/restore, optimized migration (send/receive) and instant container creation from an image. It is also considered more mature than btrfs.

To use ZFS with LXD, you first need ZFS on your system.

If using Ubuntu 16.04, simply install it with:

sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

On Ubuntu 15.10, you can install it with:

sudo apt install zfsutils-linux zfs-dkms

And on older releases, you can use the zfsonlinux PPA:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:zfs-native/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ubuntu-zfs

To configure LXD to use it, simply run:

sudo lxd init

This will ask you a few questions about what kind of zfs configuration you’d like for your LXD and then configure it for you.

btrfs

If ZFS isn’t available, then btrfs offers the same level of integration with the exception that it doesn’t properly report disk usage inside the container (quotas do apply though).
btrfs also has the nice property that it can nest properly which ZFS doesn’t yet. That is, if you plan on using LXD inside LXD, btrfs is worth considering.

LXD doesn’t need any configuration to use btrfs, you just need to make sure that /var/lib/lxd is stored on a btrfs filesystem and LXD will automatically make use of it for you.

LVM

If ZFS and btrfs aren’t an option for you, you can still get some of their benefits by using LVM instead. LXD uses LVM with thin provisioning, creating an LV for each image and container and using LVM snapshots as needed.

To configure LXD to use LVM, create a LVM VG and run:

lxc config set storage.lvm_vg_name "THE-NAME-OF-YOUR-VG"

By default LXD uses ext4 as the filesystem for all the LVs. You can change that to XFS if you’d like:

lxc config set storage.lvm_fstype xfs

Simple directory

If none of the above are an option for you, LXD will still work but without any of those advanced features. It will simply create a directory for each container, unpack the image tarballs for each container creation and do a full filesystem copy on container copy or snapshot.

All features are supported except for disk quotas, but this is very wasteful of disk space and also very slow. If you have no other choice, it will work, but you should really consider one of the alternatives above.

 

More daemon configuration

The complete list of configuration options for the LXD daemon can be found here.

Network configuration

By default LXD doesn’t listen to the network. The only way to talk to it is over a local unix socket at /var/lib/lxd/unix.socket.

To have it listen to the network, there are two useful keys to set:

lxc config set core.https_address [::]
lxc config set core.trust_password some-secret-string

The first instructs LXD to bind the “::” IPv6 address, namely, all addresses on the machine. You can obviously replace this by a specific IPv4 or IPv6 address and can append the TCP port you’d like it to bind (defaults to 8443).

The second sets a password which is used for remote clients to add themselves to the LXD certificate trust store. When adding the LXD host, they will be prompted for the password, if the password matches, the LXD daemon will store their client certificate and they’ll be trusted, never needing the password again (it can be changed or unset entirely at that point).

You can also choose not to set a password and instead manually trust each new client by having them give you their “client.crt” file (from ~/.config/lxc) and add it to the trust store yourself with:

lxc config trust add client.crt

Proxy configuration

In most setups, you’ll want the LXD daemon to fetch images from remote servers.

If you are in an environment where you must go through a HTTP(s) proxy to reach the outside world, you’ll want to set a few configuration keys or alternatively make sure that the standard PROXY environment variables are set in the daemon’s environment.

lxc config set core.proxy_http http://squid01.internal:3128
lxc config set core.proxy_https http://squid01.internal:3128
lxc config set core.proxy_ignore_hosts image-server.local

With those, all transfers initiated by LXD will use the squid01.internal HTTP proxy, except for traffic to the server at image-server.local

Image management

LXD does dynamic image caching. When instructed to create a container from a remote image, it will download that image into its image store, mark it as cached and record its origin. After a number of days without seeing any use (10 by default), the image is automatically removed. Every few hours (6 by default), LXD also goes looking for a newer version of the image and updates its local copy.

All of that can be configured through the following configuration options:

lxc config set images.remote_cache_expiry 5
lxc config set images.auto_update_interval 24
lxc config set images.auto_update_cached false

Here we are instructing LXD to override all of those defaults and instead cache images for up to 5 days since they were last used, look for image updates every 24 hours and only update images which were directly marked as such (–auto-update flag in lxc image copy) but not the images which were automatically cached by LXD.

Conclusion

At this point you should have a working version of the latest LXD release, you can now start playing with it on your own or wait for the next blog post where we’ll create our first container and play with the LXD command line tool.

Extra information

The main LXD website is at: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd
Development happens on Github at: https://github.com/lxc/lxd
Mailing-list support happens on: https://lists.linuxcontainers.org
IRC support happens in: #lxcontainers on irc.freenode.net

And if you can’t wait until the next few posts to try LXD, you can take our guided tour online and try it for free right from your web browser!

This is the first blog post in this series about LXD 2.0.

A few common questions about LXD

What’s LXD?

At its simplest, LXD is a daemon which provides a REST API to drive LXC containers.

Its main goal is to provide a user experience that’s similar to that of virtual machines but using Linux containers rather than hardware virtualization.

 

How does LXD relate to Docker/Rkt?

This is by far the question we get the most, so lets address it immediately!

LXD focuses on system containers, also called infrastructure containers. That is, a LXD container runs a full Linux system, exactly as it would be when run on metal or in a VM.

Those containers will typically be long running and based on a clean distribution image. Traditional configuration management tools and deployment tools can be used with LXD containers exactly as you would use them for a VM, cloud instance or physical machine.

In contrast, Docker focuses on ephemeral, stateless, minimal containers that won’t typically get upgraded or re-configured but instead just be replaced entirely. That makes Docker and similar projects much closer to a software distribution mechanism than a machine management tool.

The two models aren’t mutually exclusive either. You can absolutely use LXD to provide full Linux systems to your users who can then install Docker inside their LXD container to run the software they want.

Why LXD?

We’ve been working on LXC for a number of years now. LXC is great at what it does, that is, it provides a very good set of low-level tools and a library to create and manage containers.

However that kind of low-level tools aren’t necessarily very user friendly. They require a lot of initial knowledge to understand what they do and how they work. Keeping backward compatibility with older containers and deployment methods has also prevented LXC from using some security features by default, leading to more manual configuration for users.

We see LXD as the opportunity to address those shortcomings. On top of being a long running daemon which lets us address a lot of the LXC limitations like dynamic resource restrictions, container migration and efficient live migration, it also gave us the opportunity to come up with a new default experience, that’s safe by default and much more user focused.

The main LXD components

There are a number of main components that make LXD, those are typically visible in the LXD directory structure, in its command line client and in the API structure itself.

Containers

Containers in LXD are made of:

• A filesystem (rootfs)
• A list of configuration options, including resource limits, environment, security options and more
• A bunch of devices like disks, character/block unix devices and network interfaces
• A set of profiles the container inherits configuration from (see below)
• Some properties (container architecture, ephemeral or persistent and the name)
• Some runtime state (when using CRIU for checkpoint/restore)

Snapshots

Container snapshots are identical to containers except for the fact that they are immutable, they can be renamed, destroyed or restored but cannot be modified in any way.

It is worth noting that because we allow storing the container runtime state, this effectively gives us the concept of “stateful” snapshots. That is, the ability to rollback the container including its cpu and memory state at the time of the snapshot.

Images

LXD is image based, all LXD containers come from an image. Images are typically clean Linux distribution images similar to what you would use for a virtual machine or cloud instance.

It is possible to “publish” a container, making an image from it which can then be used by the local or remote LXD hosts.

Images are uniquely identified by their sha256 hash and can be referenced by using their full or partial hash. Because typing long hashes isn’t particularly user friendly, images can also have any number of properties applied to them, allowing for an easy search through the image store. Aliases can also be set as a one to one mapping between a unique user friendly string and an image hash.

LXD comes pre-configured with three remote image servers (see remotes below):

• “ubuntu:” provides stable Ubuntu images
• “ubunt-daily:” provides daily builds of Ubuntu
• “images:” is a community run image server providing images for a number of other Linux distributions using the upstream LXC templates

Remote images are automatically cached by the LXD daemon and kept for a number of days (10 by default) since they were last used before getting expired.

Additionally LXD also automatically updates remote images (unless told otherwise) so that the freshest version of the image is always available locally.

Profiles

Profiles are a way to define container configuration and container devices in one place and then have it apply to any number of containers.

A container can have multiple profiles applied to it. When building the final container configuration (known as expanded configuration), the profiles will be applied in the order they were defined in, overriding each other when the same configuration key or device is found. Then the local container configuration is applied on top of that, overriding anything that came from a profile.

LXD ships with two pre-configured profiles:

• “default” is automatically applied to all containers unless an alternative list of profiles is provided by the user. This profile currently does just one thing, define a “eth0” network device for the container.
• “docker” is a profile you can apply to a container which you want to allow to run Docker containers. It requests LXD load some required kernel modules, turns on container nesting and sets up a few device entries.

Remotes

As I mentioned earlier, LXD is a networked daemon. The command line client that comes with it can therefore talk to multiple remote LXD servers as well as image servers.

By default, our command line client comes with the following remotes defined

• local: (default remote, talks to the local LXD daemon over a unix socket)
• ubuntu: (Ubuntu image server providing stable builds)
• ubuntu-daily: (Ubuntu image server providing daily builds)
• images: (images.linuxcontainers.org image server)

Any combination of those remotes can be used with the command line client.

You can also add any number of remote LXD hosts that were configured to listen to the network. Either anonymously if they are a public image server or after going through authentication when managing remote containers.

It’s that remote mechanism that makes it possible to interact with remote image servers as well as copy or move containers between hosts.

Security

One aspect that was core to our design of LXD was to make it as safe as possible while allowing modern Linux distributions to run inside it unmodified.

The main security features used by LXD through its use of the LXC library are:

• Kernel namespaces. Especially the user namespace as a way to keep everything the container does separate from the rest of the system. LXD uses the user namespace by default (contrary to LXC) and allows for the user to turn it off on a per-container basis (marking the container “privileged”) when absolutely needed.
• Seccomp. To filter some potentially dangerous system calls.
• AppArmor: To provide additional restrictions on mounts, socket, ptrace and file access. Specifically restricting cross-container communication.
• Capabilities. To prevent the container from loading kernel modules, altering the host system time, …
• CGroups. To restrict resource usage and prevent DoS attacks against the host.

Rather than exposing those features directly to the user as LXC would, we’ve built a new configuration language which abstracts most of those into something that’s more user friendly. For example, one can tell LXD to pass any host device into the container without having to also lookup its major/minor numbers to manually update the cgroup policy.

Communications with LXD itself are secured using TLS 1.2 with a very limited set of allowed ciphers. When dealing with hosts outside of the system certificate authority, LXD will prompt the user to validate the remote fingerprint (SSH style), then cache the certificate for future use.

The REST API

Everything that LXD does is done over its REST API. There is no other communication channel between the client and the daemon.

The REST API can be access over a local unix socket, only requiring group membership for authentication or over a HTTPs socket using a client certificate for authentication.

The structure of the REST API matches the different components described above and is meant to be very simple and intuitive to use.

When a more complex communication mechanism is required, LXD will negotiate websockets and use those for the rest of the communication. This is used for interactive console session, container migration and for event notification.

With LXD 2.0, comes the /1.0 stable API. We will not break backward compatibility within the /1.0 API endpoint however we may add extra features to it, which we’ll signal by declaring additional API extensions that the client can look for.

Containers at scale

While LXD provides a good command line client, that client isn’t meant to manage thousands of containers on multiple hosts. For that kind of use cases, we have nova-lxd which is an OpenStack plugin that makes OpenStack treat LXD containers in the exact same way it would treat VMs.

This allows for very large deployments of LXDs on a large number of hosts, using the OpenStack APIs to manage network, storage and load-balancing.

Extra information

The main LXD website is at: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd
Development happens on Github at: https://github.com/lxc/lxd
Mailing-list support happens on: https://lists.linuxcontainers.org
IRC support happens in: #lxcontainers on irc.freenode.net

And if you can’t wait until the next few posts to try LXD, you can take our guided tour online and try it for free right from your web browser!

As we are getting closer and closer to tagging the final releases of LXC, LXD and LXCFS 2.0, I figured it would be a good idea to talk a bit about everything that went into LXD since we first started that project a year and a half ago.

This is going to be a blog post series similar to what I’ve done for LXC 1.0 a couple years back.

The topics that will be covered are:

• LXD 2.0: Introduction to LXD [1/12]
• LXD 2.0: Installing and configuring LXD [2/12]
• LXD 2.0: Your first LXD container [3/12]
• LXD 2.0: Resource control [4/12]
• LXD 2.0: Image management [5/12]
• LXD 2.0: Remote hosts and container migration [6/12]
• LXD 2.0: Docker in LXD [7/12]
• LXD 2.0: LXD in LXD [8/12]
• LXD 2.0: Live migration [9/12]
• LXD 2.0: LXD and Juju [10/12]
• LXD 2.0: LXD and OpenStack [11/12]
• LXD 2.0: Debugging and contributing to LXD [12/12]

Related posts:

• LXD 2.0 has been released!
• Directly interacting with the LXD API
• LXD is now available in the Ubuntu Snap Store
• Network management with LXD (2.3+)
• Running snaps in LXD containers
• Running Kubernetes inside LXD
• LXD on Debian (using snapd)
• Ubuntu Core in LXD containers
• LXD client on Windows and MacOS
• Run your own LXD demo server
• NVidia CUDA inside a LXD container
• USB hotplug with LXD containers
• Custom user mappings in LXD containers

I’m hoping to post a couple of those every week for the coming month and a half leading to the Ubuntu 16.04 release.

If you can’t wait for all of those to come out to play with LXD, you can also take the guided tour and play with LXD, online through our online demo page.