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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.
Talos Director is a management platform for the data center. It runs virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, storage, and networking on Talos Linux and the Talos hypervisor, and manages them from a single console. The immutable, declarative configuration that keeps Talos Kubernetes clusters from drifting applies to virtual machine workloads as well. Talos Director is built for organizations moving off VMware and similar platforms: its migration engine converts existing VMware virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters without application changes.

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How the pieces fit together

Talos Director is the management layer. The work itself happens on the hosts. Registering a host with Talos Director brings that machine under management, so Talos Director can see its capacity and place workloads on it. Registering a host does not create any virtual machines or Kubernetes nodes by itself.

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What Talos Director does

  • Compute clusters. Hosts are grouped into clusters that share storage. A resource scheduler places virtual machines and rebalances load across hosts using performance metrics, within the overcommit limits you set.
  • Live migration and High Availability. Virtual machines move between hosts without downtime, and when a host fails, its virtual machines restart on the surviving hosts.
  • Rolling host upgrades. Hosts are upgraded one at a time while their workloads keep running.
  • Kubernetes clusters. Talos Director creates and operates Talos Kubernetes clusters on virtual machines, including node pools, autoscaling, backups, add-ons, and guarded upgrades.
  • Networking. Micro-segmentation and live traffic analysis for virtual machine networks.
  • VMware migration. Converts existing VMware virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters to run on Talos Director.

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Documentation in this section

This documentation covers the main areas of the Talos Director console and grows as the product approaches general availability.
  • Clusters: compute cluster health and capacity, scheduling and HA settings, and rolling upgrades.
  • Hosts: adding hosts, and host health, hardware, services, and maintenance.
  • Virtual Machines: creating VMs, and power, console, disks, networking, snapshots, and backups.
  • Migrate from VMware: converting vCenter VMs, cutover modes, and importing NSX firewall rules.
  • Storage Pools: shared datastores, host mounts, and the virtual machines that depend on them.
  • Kubernetes Clusters: the Kubernetes fleet dashboard, cluster creation, and day-to-day cluster operations.
  • Virtual Networks: VLAN-backed networks for VMs, and importing networks from Cisco ACI.
  • Security: VM micro-segmentation, and security posture and compliance across Kubernetes clusters.