Canonical LXD

Canonical LXD is a system container and virtual machine management tool that aims to provide a unified user experience. According to the vendor, LXD allows users to run full Linux operating systems inside containers, containerize traditional systems and applications, and offers integration with deployment and orchestration tools. The product is designed to be suitable for companies of any size. It is said to be widely used by DevOps engineers, system administrators, software developers, cloud service providers, and research institutions to simplify infrastructure management tasks, enhance security, and improve development and testing processes.

Key Features

Flexible resource limits: According to the vendor, users can allocate and adjust resource limits for CPU, memory, network I/O, disk space, and kernel resources to ensure efficient resource allocation based on container and VM needs.

Advanced snapshot support: The product offers scheduled or manual snapshots of containers and VMs, allowing easy reversion to previous states if needed, as claimed by the vendor.

Projects for segmentation and multi-user setup: LXD supports projects, which, according to the vendor, enable multi-user setups and enhance security by providing isolation between different groups or teams.

Hardware passthrough: According to the vendor, LXD allows users to pass through devices such as GPUs, USB devices, NICs, and disks to containers or VMs for direct access to hardware resources and expanded capabilities.

Support for live-migration and stateful snapshotting: The vendor states that LXD supports live-migration, enabling users to move running containers or VMs between LXD hosts without interrupting their operation. Additionally, LXD provides stateful snapshotting, capturing the full state of a running instance, including memory and device state.

Advanced networking support: According to the vendor, LXD offers advanced networking support, including features like OVN, SR-IOV, and hardware acceleration support, allowing users to create complex network topologies and achieve high-performance networking.

High availability clustering: The vendor claims that, when combined with CEPH and OVN, LXD supports high availability clustering, ensuring storage and network redundancy for highly available containers and VMs.

LTS releases every two years: Canonical releases LTS versions of LXD every two years, providing stability and long-term maintenance with five years of support, according to the vendor.