Create Kubernetes Cluster in Proxmox Using Talos

Apr 28, 2025 min read

Introduction

Talos is a container optimized Linux distro; a reimagining of Linux for distributed systems such as Kubernetes. Designed to be as minimal as possible while still maintaining practicality.

Installation

Regardless of where you run Talos, the steps to create a Kubernetes cluster are:

  • boot machines off the Talos Linux image
  • define the endpoint for the Kubernetes API and generate your machine configurations
  • configure Talos Linux by applying machine configurations to the machines
  • configure talosctl
  • bootstrap Kubernetes

Pre-requisites

talosctl is a CLI tool which interfaces with the Talos API. Talos Linux has no SSH access: talosctl is the tool you use to interact with the operating system on the machines.

Network access

We configure our DHCP server to assign static IP addresses for the VMs that we use in our cluster.

hostname IP
talos-controller-1 10.10.10.11
talos-worker-1 10.10.10.21

Talos Image Factory

The Talos Linux Image Factory, developed by Sidero Labs, Inc., offers a method to download various boot assets for Talos Linux.

For more information about the Image Factory API and the available image formats, please visit the GitHub repository.

For our experiment, we will use the following image schematic ID generated by the Image Factory to suit our Proxmox environment: df227a758d9635f2dc034e8d4580518d889592c763d7b1d8179f8810da999e36

customization:
  extraKernelArgs:
    - -console
    - console=tty0
    - console=ttyS0
    - net.ifnames=0
  systemExtensions:
    officialExtensions:
      - siderolabs/qemu-guest-agent
      - siderolabs/util-linux-tools

References

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