The best way to launch VMs is using the images from our community server. Thanks to a built-in agent, experience with running commands and working with files (‘ lxc exec’ and ‘ lxc file’) is exactly the same as with containers. While functionality doesn’t differ much from other VM virtualization tools, we want to provide a better experience out of the box with pre-installed images and optimised choices. All devices are virtio-based (we don’t do any complex device emulation at the host level). We are, however, opinionated about the setup and the experience, which is why we use a modern Q35 layout with UEFI and SecureBoot by default. LXD VMs are based on QEMU, like other VMs you would get through libvirt and similar tools. Now, you can use system containers, VMs or manage a cluster that mixes the two, covering most of the infrastructure use cases you might have. Some enterprise policies do not consider containers safe enough for certain workloads, so including VMs allows our users to meet those policies as well. We have seen many of our users using LXD in parallel with something like libvirt, which gives some overhead as you’d have to deal with two different environments and configurations. However, since containers use the kernel of the host OS, they are not suitable when you would like to run your workloads in a different operating system, or with a different kernel than that of the host. After all, they are efficient, dense, and give the experience of a VM while being light on resources. When talking about LXD, we often focus on system containers. In this blog, we’ll explore some of the main LXD virtual machine features and how you can use them to run your infrastructure.

With the recent 5.0 LTS, LXD virtual machines are at feature parity with containers.

While LXD is mostly known for providing system containers, since the 4.0 LTS, it also natively supports virtual machines.

Ubuntu virtual machine