I'd highly recommend Talos for this if you haven't already decided. It's entirely API driven and immutable. It can be bootstrapped from PXE and truly feels like a local cloud environment.
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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Talos is amazing and if you want to start from a fully automated setup (GitOps, Renovate), I highly recommend using https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template
This is the way. They have a image generator too
I've been setting up a baremetal Talos-based cluster on 4 SFF machines and using Flux to declaratively deploy things to the cluster. Once you wrap your head around how Flux operates, deploying things becomes fairly straightforward.
For me, the most difficult process was deploying the cluster properly, but the recent-ish video posted on the Tailscale YT channel helped a LOT.
I run k3s on my bare metal cluster and for a lab I think it is excellent. Gets the cluster up and running easily so you can learn about actual Kubernetes stuff.
Personally I run it on fedora coreos, but I would not recommend that for everyone. I would just use whatever distri you like. All the usual suspects will work perfectly.
In the real world, you're more likely to see multiple vms on each server and each vm running a k8s node. So I'd go with that setup.
Once you have that going, play with clustering services within k8s: Kafka, redis, etcd, postgres.
I think I'd install proxmox on all machines because there is a proxmox provider for Terraform. Then, manually create the VMs, and to learn the barebones, use kubeadm to set everything up, and kubectl to manage it. Once comfortable and knowledgeable with that, start messing around with Terraform and Ansible.
PXE is unnecessary unless you're going to be creating a reusable boot image. Just faster to use LiveUSB.
What did you getaid off, and what are you trying to apply to? Maybe help to understand on what you're trying to learn.
Just for your own sanity, just install Talos on the 3 machines, understand how to join them to a cluster, then deploy some stuff around the cluster. Get a feel for the basics before you get into the mess of trying to do it all in VMs.
I'd also check some comparisons on the various flavors of different lube stacks: k3s, microk8s, kubedge...etc. Theres so many now it's hard to track.