The Incus team has released version 6.22 of its container and virtual machine manager, a community-driven fork of LXD. This update includes vsock support for Windows VMs, direct backup streaming, and various storage and cluster enhancements. The release aims to improve management and efficiency for users.
Incus, developed as a fork of LXD following Canonical's changes to its governance, announced version 6.22 on February 28, 2026. This edition introduces several technical improvements focused on virtual machines, storage, and cluster operations.
A notable addition is vsock support for the Windows VM agent. By incorporating signed Virtio vsock drivers and Go support on Windows, Incus now uses vsock for communication between Windows VMs instead of TCP. This change aligns Windows VM behavior with Linux counterparts and eases management in scenarios where VM IP addresses are not available.
Backup processes have been streamlined through direct backup streaming. Commands like incus export now transmit data directly, avoiding the need for temporary disk storage and thereby reducing overhead.
Snapshot management gains a disk-only restore option, enabling administrators to revert just the storage state of an instance while preserving configuration and runtime metadata.
Storage features expand with broader QCOW2 support, including default QCOW2 formatting for custom block volumes and better snapshot handling. For users of lvmcluster, the update adds storage pool resizing and an automatic removal of newer snapshots during restoration of older ones.
Cluster functionality improves with new member states such as EVACUATING and RESTORING, plus the option to restore a node without automatically migrating instances back.
Other enhancements include URL-based image imports via the incus-migrate tool for QCOW2 and VMDK formats, ACME certificate support for multiple domains in HTTPS setups, full USB controller passthrough using unix-hotplug, a security.trusted setting for SR-IOV NICs, dedicated log storage volumes, expanded certificate data in authorization scriptlets, project-specific image server restrictions, and new metrics for instance boot times.
Users can explore these features on the Incus online platform or refer to the full changelog for details.
