With the recent launch of Ubuntu 18.04 on Friday, one more longly anticipated release came to world – LXD version 3.0.

Test version of LXD 3.0 were already around for a few months, promising a plenty of new features like better migration or clustering and more, but let’s see which of those made it to the final.

Clustering

Yes! We can’t hide the excitement of this new addition released with the 3.0. LXD hosts clustering is now available and appears to be pretty simplistic. It allows you to configure multiple container hosts as a cluster that appears and responds as a single instance of LXD. The setup is straightforward and in fact is the first step you’re asked when you first run ‘lxd init’. So far there are no deep technical details around, but clustering definately makes management and scalability a lot easier.

lxd-p2c

Another interesting addition in the new release is a small tool called ‘lxd-p2c’ (physical to container). This little nice goodie enables easy migration of physical machines to containers by importing the file system of the source machine to a container through the API. The tool is distributed as a source and once compiled can be copied over to every physical server that’s about to be migrated into a container.

Storage

Local copy and move of storage volumes between storage pools is now present in the new release.

lxc storage volume copy pool1/volume1 default/volume2

and

lxc storage volume move pool1/volume1 default/volume1

and more…

A whole lot of new commands and keys are included now in LXD 3.0. You’ll be able to find some small but yet useful tweaks like a column showing the number of running processes inside a container. Other new commands are focused on networking and storage, providing a bit more visiblity and flexible management. Some changes were also made on the ‘lxc monitor’ command with a better log lines and entries rendering.