0. Requirements and Toolchain

Toolchain

You will need the following tools installed on your workstation (or on the bastion host, if you use it to access the cluster nodes):

• talosctl, the command line client for Talos Linux.

• kubectl, the command line client for Kubernetes.

• Talm, Cozystack’s own configuration manager for Talos Linux.
  

  curl -sSL https://github.com/cozystack/talm/raw/refs/heads/main/hack/install.sh | sh -s
  

Hardware Requirements

To run this tutorial, you will need the following setup:

Cluster nodes: three bare-metal servers or virtual machines in the following minimal configuration:

• CPU: 4 cores, x86 architecture.
• RAM: 16 GiB.
• Hard disks:
  • HDD1: 32GiB
    Primary disk, used for Talos Linux, etcd storage, and downloaded images.
  • HDD2: 100GiB
    Secondary disk, used for user application data.
• OS:
  • For kexec installation: any Linux distribution able to run kexec, for example, Ubuntu.
    Using kexec is a simple way to boot Talos Linux, optimal for this tutorial, but restricted on VMs by some cloud providers.
  • None, for other installation methods.
• Networking:
  • Routable FQDN domain.
    If you don’t have one, you can use nip.io with dash notation
  • Located in the same L2 network segment.
    Cozystack can be deployed with a variety of networking options, but for this tutorial it’s best to use a simple configuration.
• Anti-spoofing disabled.
  It is required for MetalLB, the load balancer used in Cozystack
• If using virtual machines, there are extra requirements:
  • CPU passthrough enabled and CPU model set to host in the hypervisor settings.
  • Nested virtualization enabled.
    Required for virtual machines and tenant kubernetes clusters.

For a more detailed explanation of hardware requirements for different setups, refer to the Hardware Requirements