Alex Oprisan (Engineer, Bunnyshell)
Building a Kubernetes Cluster with Talos on Hetzner bare metal servers

We’ll explore particularities and challenges of building cost effective Kubernetes clusters on bare metal and virtual cloud servers ( particularly from Hetzner ), to run Kubevirt VMs, to offer to end-users.

Challenges and topics:
– choosing cost effective metal servers
– building cost effective – high availability control planes – with VMs
– installing Talos on many (not identical) metal servers
– networking in Hetzner
– storage
– setting up Kubevirt
– load-balancers, ingress, exposing services
– optimising Vm stat provisioning time
– building and customising VM images

Read the slides: https://www.siderolabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Bunnyshell-TalosCon-2025-Master-Slide-Deck-1.pdf

Try Omni for multi-cluster management: https://www.siderolabs.com/omni-signup/?utm_campaign=TalosCon&utm_medium=social&utm_source=youtube

Sidero Labs

A detailed walkthrough of building a hybrid Kubernetes cluster using Talos Linux on Hetzner bare metal servers combined with VM-based control planes. The implementation addresses cost optimization for running KubeVirt workloads, achieving 1.5TB RAM and 192 vCPUs for under €600/month. Key challenges covered include networking between VMs and bare metal using VLANs, custom Talos installation scripts over SSH, consistent node naming, configuration management in Git, and storage setup with Longhorn. The architecture uses Cilium for CNI and includes practical solutions for disk discovery, VLAN tagging, and GitOps workflows with Kluctl.