Hosting Variants

Host (Default)

On the Windows host, a single VM is exclusively utilized as the Linux control-plane node while the Windows host itself functions as the worker node.

This variant is also the default, offering efficient and very low memory consumption. The VM's memory usage starts at 2GB.

Development-Only

In this variant, the focus is on setting up an environment solely for building and testing Windows and Linux containers without creating a K8s cluster.

Linux Host

Experimental

Linux host support is experimental. Some features (offline packaging, backup/restore) are not yet available. The interface may change without notice.

In this variant the Linux machine is the host. The Kubernetes control plane runs natively on the host (no VM), and an optional Windows VM is provisioned via libvirt/KVM with OVMF UEFI firmware to provide a mixed-OS worker node.

The k2s CLI is compiled as a native Linux binary and uses Go APIs directly (kubeadm, kubectl, libvirt, SSH) — no PowerShell is required.

Component	Location
Control plane (kubelet, kube-apiserver, etcd, …)	Linux host
Linux container runtime (CRI-O / containerd)	Linux host
Windows worker (optional)	Windows VM via KVM
CLI	k2s (Linux binary)