vSphere Concepts in Talos Director

Talos Director is in Limited Availability. Limited Availability customers receive full production support and work directly with Sidero Labs engineering during onboarding. General availability is planned for January 2027, and the console is changing quickly until then, so details on these pages may differ from what you see.To request access, visit siderolabs.com/getdirector.

This page maps vSphere terms to their Talos Director equivalents, then describes where the two platforms work differently. To move VMs from vCenter, see Migrate from VMware.

Terms

vSphere	Talos Director	Notes
vCenter Server	Talos Director control plane	The console, the API, the inventory, the scheduler, and High Availability decisions. One per data center. See How Talos Director Works.
ESXi host	Talos Linux host	Talos Linux with the KVM hypervisor. Managed entirely through its API, with no shell or SSH. See Hosts.
vSphere cluster	Compute cluster	A group of hosts that share storage. See Clusters.
DRS	Resource scheduler	Automation levels from Manual to fully automated, with affinity and anti-affinity rules.
vSphere HA	High Availability	Admission control, failover capacity, and VM restart priority, set per cluster.
vMotion	Live migration	Moves a running VM between hosts in a compute cluster.
Storage vMotion	Storage migration	Moves a VM’s disks from one storage pool to another.
Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC)	CPU profile	Fixes the CPU model and feature set a VM sees, so it can move between hosts of different CPU generations.
Maintenance mode	Maintenance mode	Live-migrates a host’s VMs away before the host is taken out of service.
Datastore	Storage pool	NFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, or Ceph built from the hosts’ own drives. See Storage Pools.
Storage policies	Storage policies	Describe what a VM’s disks need, matched against what each storage pool provides.
Port group	Virtual network	A VLAN on the hosts’ bonded uplinks. See Virtual Networks.
NSX distributed firewall	Micro-segmentation	Security groups and policies, enforced in each host’s kernel and following the VM when it moves. See Security.
Content library and VM templates	Content library and templates	Create VMs from a template rather than from scratch.
Customization specifications	Customization specifications	Set a guest’s identity and first-boot configuration when it is deployed from a template.
Host profiles	Host configuration profiles	Define what goes into a host’s machine configuration, so hosts that share a profile are identical.
vSphere Lifecycle Manager	Lifecycle Manager	Host operating system and server firmware updates, within maintenance windows.
Shares, reservations, and limits	Shares, reservations, and limits	Per-VM CPU and memory shares, reservations, and limits, enforced on the host.
VMware Tools	QEMU guest agent and VirtIO drivers	Installed in the guest. The migration engine removes VMware Tools during conversion.
vSphere Kubernetes Service	Kubernetes clusters	Talos Linux clusters on VMs, created from the same console and managed through Omni. See Kubernetes Clusters.

How Talos Director differs from vSphere

The hosts have no shell. There is no equivalent of the ESXi shell or SSH on a Talos Linux host. Everything about a host is defined in its machine configuration, which Talos Director manages, and the host is operated through an authenticated API. Troubleshooting that would start with an SSH session on ESXi starts with the host’s detail screen in the console instead. The virtual machines themselves are ordinary guests, with full access through the console, RDP, or SSH. Hosts are upgraded by replacing the image. A Talos Linux host is a read-only image. An upgrade swaps the whole image, one host at a time, with the host’s VMs live-migrated away first. There are no patches or VIBs to apply, and no package transaction that can half-apply. The hosts open the management connections. vCenter connects in to each ESXi host. In Talos Director, each host opens an outbound connection to the control plane and keeps it open, so hosts need no inbound management port. Kubernetes is part of the platform. Kubernetes nodes are VMs on the same hosts, in the same inventory, under the same scheduler, High Availability, storage, and firewall policy as every other VM. There is no separate Kubernetes product to install and run beside it. You supply VMware’s disk library. Migrating a VM while it keeps running (scheduled or automatic cutover) requires VMware’s Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). Talos Director does not bundle it, so you upload it from your own VMware entitlement. See What Happens During a Migration.

Overview

Compute

Kubernetes

Networking

Security

Terms

How Talos Director differs from vSphere

​Terms

​How Talos Director differs from vSphere

Terms

How Talos Director differs from vSphere