Migrating Azure Confidential VM Workloads to OpenMetal XL v5

Q: Can I migrate Azure Confidential VM workloads to OpenMetal XL v5?

Yes — Azure Confidential VMs and OpenMetal XL v5 both use Intel TDX, so the workload’s threat model and attestation flow translate cleanly; the structural difference is OpenMetal runs TDX on dedicated bare metal you control rather than on a shared cloud hypervisor.

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Azure Confidential VMs based on Intel TDX expose trust domain semantics to the guest in the same way OpenMetal XL v5 does — a Linux guest built with TDX module support, an attestation quote produced by the hardware, and a verifier that gates secret release on a valid token. Workloads designed for Azure Confidential VMs (TDX-attested Kubernetes nodes, confidential databases, confidential analytics pipelines, sensitive ML inference) typically port to OpenMetal without changes to the guest OS or the application stack. The verifier substitution — from Azure Attestation to Intel Trust Authority or a custom RA-TLS implementation — is the main integration point.

The structural differences are tenancy and pricing. Azure Confidential VMs are virtual machines on a shared Azure hypervisor; OpenMetal XL v5 is a dedicated single-tenant bare metal server. Both models defend against host-OS compromise via TDX, but on OpenMetal the host hypervisor and host OS are not shared with other tenants in the first place — it is a layered posture rather than a single defense. Pricing moves from Azure’s per-hour metered model (with a Confidential VM SKU premium) to OpenMetal’s fixed monthly model with no TDX premium because the server already meets the trust domain RAM threshold by default.

For multi-region sovereign deployments, OpenMetal’s four regions — Ashburn, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Singapore — give EU and APAC localization options. Ramp pricing is available for migrations from Azure during the parallel-run period. The OpenMetal team supports the attestation flow setup and can help architect the verifier substitution. For customers running large Azure Confidential VM estates where egress is a meaningful line item, the 95th-percentile egress model on OpenMetal often produces a larger TCO win than the compute migration alone.

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