Hosting and Resource Pools

Hosting and resource pools connect internal or third-party host capacity to PayIncus so the system can sell and deliver instances by host, plan and capacity.

Resource Model

Object	Description
Host	A physical or virtual host running Incus and the Agent.
Plan	CPU, memory, disk, traffic, price and billing cycle offered to users.
Image	OS image selectable during instance creation.
Resource pool	Aggregated capacity and supply.
Hosting revenue	Revenue and settlement records for resource providers.

User Hosting Features

Availability depends on system configuration:

• Submit hosted hosts.
• View host state, resource reports and review result.
• Create and edit hosted plans.
• View hosting revenue and settlement records.

For new hosted hosts, use Ubuntu 22.04+ or Debian 12/13. Debian 11 remains a compatibility path only; new hosts should prefer Debian 12/13.

Admin Hosting Features

• Review hosted hosts and resource providers.
• View capacity, online state and Agent heartbeat.
• Manage plans, images, pools and supply state.
• Handle revenue, settlement and abnormal resources.

Agent Relationship

Agent provides runtime truth:

• Host heartbeat.
• CPU, memory, disk and traffic reports.
• Instance state reports.
• Agent release metadata.
• Signature and replay protection.

Risks

• Host capacity must be checked against both Agent reports and admin configuration.
• Resource providers must not access other users' resources.
• Plan availability changes must not break renewal or billing for existing instances.
• Do not keep allocating resources blindly when the Agent is offline.
• If Incus returns not authorized, first check whether the host trusts the current panel certificate. Generate a fresh host install command and run it on the host to refresh the panel trust entry.
• Prefer LVM when creating storage pools on Debian/cloud kernels. Choose ZFS only after confirming the host can run modprobe zfs. If ZFS pool creation returns modprobe: FATAL: Module zfs not found, the host does not have a usable ZFS kernel module. Repair linux-headers-$(uname -r) / zfs-dkms, or use LVM, Btrfs, or DIR storage instead.
• Resource deletion and revenue settlement must leave audit records.

Verification Checklist

• Agent heartbeat and resource reports are healthy.
• The admin console can read host storage pools and create or link a storage pool.
• Capacity changes are reflected in the admin console.
• User hosting entry points follow the system configuration.
• Admins can review and manage hosted resources.
• Instance delivery does not allocate to unavailable hosts.