Hi, I am new to LXD, having come from traditional KVM. I have just created a Windows VM in LXD. Is there any kid of lxd-agent for windows?
Also, after windows is installed, what LXD / LXC drivers are required?
Kind regards.
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Assuming you used an image repacked by distrobuilder, then you already have all the drivers in your install. You can always head to https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/latest-virtio/ to get the latest drivers and update to them, but in general you should already be good.
Currently the LXD agent doesn’t work on Windows. That’s because we rely on vsock and virtiofs, both of which are still work in progress as far as Windows drivers (if you look in device manager, that’s actually the two devices listed without drivers).
There is ongoing work in that area though, so we’re hoping that we’ll “soon” be able to run lxd-agent on Windows, offering lxc exec, lxc file, … to Windows instances.
Until then, your best bet is to configure and use RDP to interact with your Windows system.
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Thats great info, thanks stgraber.
I don’t know if it can be of interest to anyone, but EMS/SAC can be used to get serial console access to a Windows VM. i.e. lxc console winvm yields a login console-ish (à la Windows).
I see that lxd-agent provides a lot of small pieces to lxd so I can’t tell how lxd-agent for Windows would work. Though, from here/the surface, it seems like vsock is in virtio-win’s repo, but not being shipped yet? I’m assuming that this is for control messages exchange, and that virtiofs is for file exchanges. Is that correct?
Related is the qemu-guest-agent. I didn’t dive into how it’s implemented, but it seems like it might give pointers… maybe. Or maybe it’s already how lxd-agent is implemented, I don’t know. 
Anyway, the thought of being able to lxc exec into Windows is quite entertaining.
Yeah, we’re still waiting for the vsock driver to be actually included in a virtio-win release. Once it is, we should be able to get a build of lxd-agent on Windows, though potentially a pretty manual one of that if we can’t also get 9p/virtiofs working at the same time.
The qemu agent I believe relies on a serial console of some kind which then doesn’t have that limitation but also comes with a bunch of limitations of its own (lower bandwidth, harder to handle multiple parallel connections, harder bi-directional handling, …).
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May I ask whether lxd-agent has been available on windows10/11 now ? If not, when will lxd-agent get Windows support? I’m looking forward to this.With the lxc exec , lxc file,it will be easier to manage and access files in Windows instances.
Kind regards.
Not yet. We’d like to have it be available on Windows but we first need a fully functional vsock driver to exist for Windows.
The Red Hat virtio driver team has been working on that on and off, but last I checked, there’s no official stable build of it yet.
Thanks for your reply, Mr Graber.It will be an exciting day when it comes, and I am looking for some alternatives to interact with Windows instances during the time.