Today we're announcing Talos Director: a data center resource manager for configuring and tracking virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, data storage, and networking resources. It's built on Talos Linux for Hypervisor and Talos Linux for Kubernetes, and it's an alternative to VMware and similar products.
Enterprises are reassessing their virtualization estates and their cloud infrastructure requirements. Two weeks ago we announced Talos Hypervisor - native KVM in Talos Linux, with all the security, resource efficiency and manageability advantages of Talos Linux. But the hypervisor is just a part of the story for enterprises. The hard part is everything above it: scheduling where a VM operates, live migration, HA policy, snapshots, resource pools, console access. Even if you switch out your hypervisor, all of that coordination and business logic still has to come from somewhere.
Talos Director solves the hard parts - it provides all the capabilities enterprises need to run virtual machines in production, at scale, with high availability. It also incorporates the functionality of Omni, Sidero’s fleet manager for making Kubernetes at scale easy and secure. You get one secure OS underneath your entire platform, one API, and a consistent interface, covering your VMs, your clusters, and the storage and network resources they depend on. A turnkey platform for demanding data center requirements.
What's in it
Talos Director provides centralized lifecycle management for virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters. For virtual machines, this means:
- live migration, so you can patch or retire a host without finding a maintenance window
- high availability
- auto scaling
- resource scheduling of workloads based on live performance metrics
- support for complex firewall rules and micro-segmentation at scale, without performance impacts.
- fault tolerance, supported by heartbeat monitoring, snapshot and recovery, and cross-cluster mobility
There's also conversion and migration tooling for getting existing VMs into the platform. (This matters more than a feature list makes it seem. More on that next.)
Yardi's migration
The largest Talos Director deployment so far is Yardi's, which is not a coincidence. Yardi was running Talos Linux in production before it acquired Sidero Labs, and realized what a hypervisor based on Talos could do for its virtualization estate. Talos Director came out of that.
Joel Loewen, VP Cloud, Yardi, parent company of Sidero Labs, on how it has gone:
"Yardi has transitioned thousands of virtual machines and hundreds of Kubernetes clusters from VMware to Talos Director." said Joel Loewen, VP Yardi Cloud. "The Talos Director conversion and migration functionality has been invaluable and allowed us to transition without any platform reengineering. We are on track to completely transition Yardi Cloud to Talos Director."
No platform reengineering is a key phrase in this quote. It means the applications didn't change, and nobody had to be retrained onto a new operating model to get the VMs migrated. That's a cost that doesn't appear on a license quote, and it's one worth pricing out for your own estate before you commit to any platform - ours included.
Come and see it in action
I'd rather you looked at this in person than take my word for it. Come to Amsterdam or any of the other conferences, ask the engineers who built it the questions your ops team would ask, and tell us what you think.
KubeCon, Salt Lake City, Nov. 9-12, 2026
Gartner Expo, Las Vegas, Dec. 8-10, 2026
TalosCon, Santa Barbara, Jan. 26-27, 2027
You can also apply for Limited Early Access here.
FAQ
What is Talos Director?
Talos Director is a cloud and data center resource manager from Sidero Labs that configures and tracks virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, data storage, and networking resources from a single interface. It's built on Talos Hypervisor and Talos Kubernetes, so the VMs and the clusters run on one operating system with one API.
Is Talos Director a VMware alternative?
Yes. Talos Director provides VMware functionality, including live migration, high availability, auto scaling, resource scheduling, and fault tolerance, under a single operating system and unified API. Yardi has migrated thousands of virtual machines and hundreds of Kubernetes clusters from VMware to Talos Director without platform re-engineering.
When will Talos Director be generally available?
The Talos Director alpha release and a public demo are at TalosCon 2026 in Amsterdam on October 15-16, 2026. General availability follows in January 2027.
How do you migrate virtual machines from VMware to Talos Director?
Talos Director includes conversion and migration functionality for moving existing virtual machines onto the platform. Yardi used it to move thousands of VMs and hundreds of Kubernetes clusters off VMware, and needed no platform re-engineering to do it. Yardi Cloud, with 1 million users and 15 million tenants, is scheduled to complete its move in Q2 2027.
Does Talos Director change Talos Linux, or make it less open source?
No. Talos Linux remains fully open source under the MPL-2.0 license, unchanged. Talos Director is built on top of Talos Linux and doesn't put a paywall in front of anything that's free today.
Does Talos Director replace Talos Omni?
No. Talos Omni continues as the management plane for Kubernetes fleets and is still the right choice if Kubernetes is all you run. Talos Director is for estates that need virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, storage, and networking managed together.
If you're scoping a VMware migration now and want to talk through whether Talos Director fits, email us at sales@siderolabs.com.
