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Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

linuxcontainers.org

11–20 of 71 posts

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#11

Not _technically_ a hypervisor since these are Linux (system) containers and use the same cgroup magic under the hood as docker/containerd. But this is definitely neat. I've found Incus quite handy for development environments, and a good compliment to docker.

It's a lot more than that. Clustering, storage drivers, networking, etc makes up a whole virtual machine manager. It never says it's a hypervisor, it's a VMM as outlined on it's github: "Powerful system container and virtual machine manager"

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#12
post #10

I used Proxmox for years to run a fairly comprehensive homelab, and a few months ago replaced the entire thing with Incus (on a debian host, haven't tried IncusOS yet). Incus is amazing and it makes so many things so much easier compared to Proxmox. One thing in particular is permissions in unprivileged containers. In Proxmox, you have to do a bunch of somewhat confusing ID mapping. In Incus, it's as simple as settin…

Profiles are really great. It's like cloud-init on steroids

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#13
post #10

I used Proxmox for years to run a fairly comprehensive homelab, and a few months ago replaced the entire thing with Incus (on a debian host, haven't tried IncusOS yet). Incus is amazing and it makes so many things so much easier compared to Proxmox. One thing in particular is permissions in unprivileged containers. In Proxmox, you have to do a bunch of somewhat confusing ID mapping. In Incus, it's as simple as settin…

Incus is more comparable to LXD than proxmox. IncusOS is different though.

LXD containers also are unprivileged by default.

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#15
post #13
post #10

I used Proxmox for years to run a fairly comprehensive homelab, and a few months ago replaced the entire thing with Incus (on a debian host, haven't tried IncusOS yet). Incus is amazing and it makes so many things so much easier compared to Proxmox. One thing in particular is permissions in unprivileged containers. In Proxmox, you have to do a bunch of somewhat confusing ID mapping. In Incus, it's as simple as settin…

Incus is more comparable to LXD than proxmox. IncusOS is different though. LXD containers also are unprivileged by default.

You might be mixing up LXC and LXD

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#16
post #9
post #8

I guess IncusOS (and Incus) achieve similar goals to ProxMox? Has anyone used both and have any opinions on how they perform?

I have switched to incus and it's really great. It's lightweight, has a working terraform provider, easy-to-use cli, pre-built images (LXC and VM) of major distros (while in proxmox, you have to create templates all the time for VMs), runs on any distro (on proxmox, you're stuck with debian), clustering is nice, supports bunch of storage drivers (dir, btrfs, ceph, zfs), simple web UI and active community. The project…

Though IncusOS itself is based on Debian so for the first point against Proxmox I guess using Incus on your OS of choice would be better?

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#17
post #14

In case there might be people who are not familiar with Incus, it was forked from LXD to keep it open source. It's very good software.

AFAIK LXD is still opensource, as are most if not all products from Canonical. I think the fork is because LXD when it was moved to Canonical made the community uneasy because of the way that they would integrate with Ubuntu lifecycle and tooling.

https://github.com/canonical/lxd it's AGPL-V3

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#18
post #15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incus is more comparable to LXD than proxmox. IncusOS is different though. LXD containers also are unprivileged by default.

You might be mixing up LXC and LXD

Even I that worked for a long while with this tech would mix them up time and again, I think it's understandable.

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#19
post #10

I used Proxmox for years to run a fairly comprehensive homelab, and a few months ago replaced the entire thing with Incus (on a debian host, haven't tried IncusOS yet). Incus is amazing and it makes so many things so much easier compared to Proxmox. One thing in particular is permissions in unprivileged containers. In Proxmox, you have to do a bunch of somewhat confusing ID mapping. In Incus, it's as simple as settin…

Interesting. Is there anything else that is better than proxmox? Like performance etc?

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#20
post #7

Really excited to try this out. I have a fleet of containers on ubuntu + incus. Not only does this do ZFS optimization, I look forward having easy container optimized backup, live cluster migration (to a different machine without downtime) and so much more. I use Proxmox on fat servers, but for homelab-like setup Incus OS seems more like a sweet spot

I was hoping for easy backup via zfs send as well, but turns out it’s not so easy atm.

IncusOS does not give you shell access, you have to figure out IncusOS ways to do things via their CLI/API. I haven’t found an easy way to do incremental backup of the whole system yet. You can backup individual instances/volumes via incus export (which seems to use zfs send under the hood), but not the whole thing.

I have mixed feelings about their decision not to give you shell access. Guess those who want flexibility can always just install Incus on top of any Linux they like, but it would be nice to have an escape hatch for when IncusOS gives you almost everything you want…

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