Canonical announces Multipass 1.17 on October 19, 2026, adding built-in Debian and Fedora cloud images alongside Ubuntu. The release also introduces local Availability Zones and changes the default Windows driver, while the new macOS driver remains a preview. Canonical’s release announcement details the changes and their implications for existing setups.
Debian and Fedora join Ubuntu in the image catalog
Multipass 1.17 adds Debian and Fedora cloud images; Ubuntu remains available. That gives you more choice when creating local virtual machines, without changing Ubuntu’s place in the catalog.
Availability Zones bring isolated subnets to local setups
Multipass 1.17 provides three predefined Availability Zones, each with its own isolated subnet. You can launch an instance in a zone, list the zones, or enable and disable them with these commands:
multipass launch --zone <zone-name>
multipass zones
multipass disable-zones <zone-name>
multipass enable-zones <zone-name>
Disabling a zone unplugs its instances and marks them unavailable. When you upgrade to 1.17, existing instances are assigned to zone 1. That behavior matters if you use zones to test how services respond to isolated network environments or zone outages.
Windows and macOS drivers take different paths
On Windows, the new default driver uses Host Compute System (HCS) APIs and works across Windows editions, including Home. Canonical deprecates the Hyper-V and VirtualBox drivers. It provides a migration path for existing Hyper-V virtual machines, but does not plan automatic migration for existing VirtualBox instances; those instances remain usable in this release.
On macOS, the Apple Virtualization Framework driver is a preview, not the default. QEMU remains the default, and the preview does not support every Multipass feature. Canonical says the preview is available on Mac variants and offers faster startup; on macOS 26, it also supports native ASIF disk images. VirtualBox continues on Intel Macs.
| Platform | Multipass 1.17 driver | Status and effect on existing setups |
| Windows | HCS-based driver | New default; works on all Windows editions, including Home. Hyper-V and VirtualBox drivers are deprecated. Hyper-V virtual machines have a migration path; existing VirtualBox instances have no planned automatic migration and remain usable in this release. |
| macOS | Apple Virtualization Framework | Preview with limited feature support; QEMU remains the default. The preview offers faster startup and native ASIF disk-image support on macOS 26. VirtualBox continues on Intel Macs. |
Architecture, resource and command-line changes
Multipass 1.17 adds support for the Linux architectures ppc64el (IBM Power) and s390x (IBM Z), with official snaps available for both. New instances have minimum settings of 512 MiB of memory and 1 GiB of disk.
The release removes Blueprints and appliances, the LXD and libvirt drivers, the deprecated mem shortcut, and the deprecated multipass info --all option. For scripts, shell and exec now pass through the guest command’s exit code; code 255 is reserved for Multipass failures. Mount target paths are normalized, and scripts that consume JSON should not rely on key order.
Other changes include a redesigned GUI image catalog that defaults to the latest Ubuntu LTS, the multipass wait-ready command, cloud-init reboot support, corrected exec exit-code handling, improved certificate handling, and clearer authentication errors.
