Requirements and Toolchain

Prepare infrastructure and install the toolchain.

Toolchain

You will need the following tools installed on your workstation:

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

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

Cluster nodes: three bare-metal servers or virtual machines. Hardware requirements depend on your usage scenario:

Here are the baseline requirements for running a small installation. The minimum recommended configuration for each node is as follows:

Component	Requirement
Hosts	3x Physical hosts (or VMs with host CPU passthrough)
Architecture	x86_64
CPU	8 cores
RAM	24 GB
Primary Disk	50 GB SSD (or RAW for VMs)
Secondary Disk	256 GB SSD (raw)

Suitable for:

For small production environments, the recommended configuration for each node is as follows:

Suitable for:

For medium to large production environments, the optimal configuration for each node is as follows:

Suitable for:

Storage:

Primary Disk: Used for Talos Linux, etcd storage, and downloaded images. Low latency is required.
Secondary Disk: Used for user application data (ZFS pool).

OS:

Any Linux distribution, for example, Ubuntu.
There are other installation methods which require either any Linux or no OS at all to start.

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.
Anti-spoofing disabled.
It is required for MetalLB, the load balancer used in Cozystack.

Virtual machines:

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