The LXD container hypervisor

10x the density of ESX, 25% faster, with zero latency

It has been a while since I've been waiting for LXC to be stable enough to use in production. Let me tell you why I think that: LXD works like a daemon for LXC, it allows you to establish a communication handshake between your LXC client and any machine you have with LXD hosting several containers.

Lightweight and simple, just pop your command-line client and start creating, starting, stopping, cloning and snapshotting. Moving containers between LXD hosts is just as easy and performant. Here are the main LXD advantages:

  • Secure by design (unprivileged containers, resource restrictions and much more)

  • Scalable (from containers on your laptop to thousands of compute nodes)

  • Intuitive (simple, clear API and crisp command line experience)

  • Image-based (no more distribution templates, only good, trusted images)

If you’re using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, start by:

$> sudo lxd init

If that's not enough, try also:
$> sudo apt-get install lxd


This will install the LXD daemon, client tools and also LXC. LXD is not a replacement for LXC, it's just a daemon and a new set of client libraries and tools that allow you to manage remote servers hosting the containers.

Now you can create a new container:

$> lxc create odoo1


Or in a remote host:

$> lxc create host1:odoo1


List existing containers:

$> lxc list host1:

Get access to the container's console:

$> lxc exec host1:odoo1 bash

Lots of other commands just use --help
$> lxc --help


* config - Manage configuration

* copy - Copy containers within or in between lxd instances.

* delete - Delete containers or container snapshots.

* exec - Execute the specified command in a container.

* file - Manage files on a container.

* help - Presents details on how to use LXD.

* image - Manipulate container images.

* info - List information on LXD servers and containers.

* launch - Launch a container from a particular image.

* list - Lists the available resources.

* move - Move containers within or in between lxd instances.

* profile - Manage configuration profiles.

* publish - Publish containers as images.

* remote - Manage remote LXD servers.

* restart - Changes state of one or more containers to restart.

* restore - Set the current state of a resource back to a snapshot.

* snapshot - Create a read-only snapshot of a container.

* start - Changes state of one or more containers to start.

* stop - Changes state of one or more containers to stop.

* version - Prints the version number of this client tool.


For the remote host, you need to do the following to get access:

lxc config set core.https_address "[::]"

lxc config set core.trust_password some-password


I hope this post gets you pumped enough for trying LXD, we sure love the concept and will be trying this "stable version" on test servers first ;)