Running Kubernetes on the OpenMetal XXL v4

Q: Can I run Kubernetes on an OpenMetal XXL v4 bare metal server?

Kubernetes runs on the OpenMetal XXL v4 bare metal server with full control over the distribution, CNI, and storage layer — no managed Kubernetes restrictions apply.

Learn about Kubernetes workloads

Distributions tested on OpenMetal bare metal include Talos Linux, Flatcar Container Linux, and K3s, deployable on the base OS image or via IPMI. The XXL v4’s 64 cores, 128 threads, and 2TB DDR5 support high-density pod scheduling — workloads that cause OOM pressure on smaller nodes run without memory contention across the full pool.

Local persistent volumes are supported on the 38.4TB NVMe array, eliminating the need for an external storage backend for stateful workloads in single-server deployments. LACP-bonded 10 Gbps networking provides bandwidth headroom for container image distribution, Kubernetes API traffic, and pod-to-pod communication in multi-server clusters — intra-cluster traffic on the private VLAN is unmetered.

For multi-node clusters, the XXL v4 is also available as part of OpenMetal’s Hosted Private Cloud with OpenStack + Ceph, where Kubernetes runs on OpenStack VMs backed by Ceph RBD persistent volumes with Day 2 operations included.