While Incus appears to support Windows agents, there is currently no available documentation that explains how to use this feature.
See the bottom of How to create instances - Incus documentation
Does 6.0.5-lts version support window agent?
It does
is there a way to see if its working? i have it running in a windows vm but incus still doesn’t have any ip’s, cpu/mem info
Only OS version, file transfer and exec is supported through the agent on Windows at this point.
You can check if it connected by running incus info NAME and see if the OS info section shows up.
Seems like Incus LTS v6.0.5 does not include the incus-agent.exe
Mounting via incus config device add INSTANCE-NAME agent disk source=agent:config
What distro and packages is that on?
Incus 6.16 doesn’t include the `incus-agent.exe` too
Both the stable (6.16) and lts (6.0.5) packages that I produce do contain the agent for both Linux and Windows (both 32bit and 64bit) too. If your system doesn’t have those, you’ll probably want to file a bug with your distribution.
root@incus-stable:~# dpkg -l | grep incus
ii incus 1:6.16-debian13-202508291557 amd64 Incus - Container and virtualization daemon
ii incus-base 1:6.16-debian13-202508291557 amd64 Incus - Container and virtualization daemon (container-only)
ii incus-client 1:6.16-debian13-202508291557 amd64 Incus - Command line client
root@incus-stable:~# ls -lh /opt/incus/agent/
total 77M
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 17M Aug 29 15:57 incus-agent.linux.i686
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 18M Aug 29 15:57 incus-agent.linux.x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21M Aug 29 15:57 incus-agent.windows.i686
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 22M Aug 29 15:57 incus-agent.windows.x86_64
root@incus-lts:~# dpkg -l | grep incus
ii incus 1:6.0.5-debian13-202508290330 amd64 Incus - Container and virtualization daemon
ii incus-base 1:6.0.5-debian13-202508290330 amd64 Incus - Container and virtualization daemon (container-only)
ii incus-client 1:6.0.5-debian13-202508290330 amd64 Incus - Command line client
root@incus-lts:~# ls -lh /opt/incus/agent/
total 76M
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 17M Aug 29 03:30 incus-agent.linux.i686
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 18M Aug 29 03:30 incus-agent.linux.x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21M Aug 29 03:30 incus-agent.windows.i686
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 22M Aug 29 03:30 incus-agent.windows.x86_64
root@byte ~ # lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS
Release: 24.04
Codename: noble
root@byte ~ # apt-cache policy incus
incus:
Installed: 1:6.0.5-ubuntu24.04-202508290527
Candidate: 1:6.0.5-ubuntu24.04-202508290527
Version table:
*** 1:6.0.5-ubuntu24.04-202508290527 510
510 https://pkgs.zabbly.com/incus/lts-6.0 noble/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
1:6.0.5-ubuntu24.04-202508170336 510
510 https://pkgs.zabbly.com/incus/lts-6.0 noble/main amd64 Packages
1:6.0.4-ubuntu24.04-202506291720 510
510 https://pkgs.zabbly.com/incus/lts-6.0 noble/main amd64 Packages
6.0.0-1ubuntu0.3+esm2 510
510 https://esm.ubuntu.com/apps/ubuntu noble-apps-security/main amd64 Packages
6.0.0-1ubuntu0.3 500
500 http://mirror.hetzner.com/ubuntu/packages noble-updates/universe amd64 Packages
500 http://mirror.hetzner.com/ubuntu/packages noble-security/universe amd64 Packages
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-updates/universe amd64 Packages
500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-security/universe amd64 Packages
6.0.0-1 500
500 http://mirror.hetzner.com/ubuntu/packages noble/universe amd64 Packages
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble/universe amd64 Packages
root@byte ~ # dpkg -l | grep incus
ii incus 1:6.0.5-ubuntu24.04-202508290527 amd64 Incus - Container and virtualization daemon
rc incus-agent 6.0.0-1ubuntu0.2+esm1 amd64 Incus guest agent
ii incus-base 1:6.0.5-ubuntu24.04-202508290527 amd64 Incus - Container and virtualization daemon (container-only)
ii incus-client 1:6.0.5-ubuntu24.04-202508290527 amd64 Incus - Command line client
root@byte ~ # ls -lh /opt/incus/agent/
total 76M
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 17M Aug 29 07:27 incus-agent.linux.i686
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 18M Aug 29 07:27 incus-agent.linux.x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21M Aug 29 07:27 incus-agent.windows.i686
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 22M Aug 29 07:27 incus-agent.windows.x86_64
incus config set INSTANCE-NAME image.os=“Windows 11”
Did the trick, found this in another post.
After setting the image.os to Windows and remounting the config:agent disk, the incus-agent.exe executable appeared. Executing with .\incus-agent.exe -dv have the Starting TCP Listener, but incus exec windows-vm1 – cmd.exe will got Error: VM agent isn’t currently running
You have to add firewall allow rule in windows deffender firewall.
bellow is a PowerShell example:
New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName incus-agent -Direction Inbound -LocalPort 8443 -Protocol tcp -Action Allow -RemoteAddress (Get-NetRoute -DestinationPrefix 0.0.0.0/0).NextHop
so far i have only been able to get the windows agent to work on the incusbr0 with nat enabled where it see’s the ip. is there a way to get it working on bridges using external interfaces?
Not currently. We don’t have vsock support on Windows as there is currently no signed driver for it. As a result, the agent communication is happening over the network instead with Incus using the IP address it has for communication.
That makes the agent currently incompatible with any environment in which Incus isn’t aware of the guest’s IP as well as any environment where the host cannot connect to the guest, whether because of firewalling or NAT.
is there a way to manually tell incus the vm ip so it can communicate with the agent without using the built in dhcp on network?
Not currently, though we could probably introduce a volatile config key or something to act as a workaround until we get proper vsock support. We’d just have to be careful about security there as in clusters with a variety of users with different access level, you don’t want users to be able to get Incus to communicate with arbitrary addresses.
Hi, sorry to do some “necro-posting”, which networks are aware of the guest IP ? From what I have understand Incus managed bridges or OVN networks are IP aware but does managed physical network are guest IP aware ?