Status: second-class, not actively used. This converged/libvirt Talos substrate is maintained at low priority and is not part of the actively-run deployment. Treat the docs in this subtree as informational -- they may lag the live stacks; validate against current code before relying on any step.

Hyper-converged Talos K8s on the 3-node Sietch Ceph cluster. Those hosts have idle CPU + memory headroom (Ceph spends its budget on disk and network I/O), so the Talos VMs run there instead of on dedicated K8s hardware.

This subtree is the Ansible substrate: it provisions the VLAN 50/51 bridges, the libvirt/KVM stack, and stages the Talos VMs — stopping when the VMs are running and ready for talosctl. The Terraform half in tf/deployment/staging/austin/talos/ renders the Ansible inventory and drives cluster bring-up (machine config, bootstrap, kubeconfig).

That boundary is deliberate: Ansible stays declarative and idempotent, and the one-shot cluster bootstrap (etcd init, cluster CA) lives in Terraform. Mixing a one-shot bootstrap into idempotent plays is awkward, and keeping cluster secrets out of Ansible's fact cache keeps the blast radius small.

Scope (in)

VLAN 50 (Compute, 10.50.0.0/16) + VLAN 51 (Services, 10.51.0.0/16) L2 bridges on each hypervisor's bond0.
Idempotent install of qemu-kvm + libvirt-daemon + ovmf + virtinst.
br_netfilter bypass so Talos VM↔VM traffic isn't dropped by Ceph's existing inet filter forward DROP.
Fetch + checksum-verify + stage the official Talos metal-amd64 image.
Define and start Talos VMs per profile.

Scope (out)

talosctl gen config / apply-config / bootstrap — the Terraform siderolabs/talos provider owns these (tf/deployment/staging/austin/talos/); docs/operator-handoff.md keeps the manual sequence for recovery.
Persistent storage for VMs (RBD-backed boot disks, ceph-csi). Boot disks are local qcow2 today; RBD lands in a follow-up.
Switch/VLAN tagging — assumed already done upstream (VLAN 50/51 tagged on every hypervisor's bond0 uplink).
GitOps / Flux / workloads — land after the storage follow-up.

Hardware

Host	Role	Full VMs
sietch-ceph-laurel	Ceph + hypervisor	sietch-talos-cp1, worker1
sietch-ceph-lawson	Ceph + hypervisor	sietch-talos-cp2, worker2
sietch-ceph-samara	Ceph + hypervisor	sietch-talos-cp3, worker3

Full profile (production, the default everywhere) = 3 CP + 3 workers, one CP + one worker per hypervisor (each host is its own failure domain). Smoke profile = cp1 + worker1 on laurel — a single-host validation tool, selected explicitly with -e profile=smoke.

Operator workflow

Inventory is TF-rendered from tf/deployment/staging/austin/talos/. Run TF first (from the repo root):

TF_STACK_DIR=tf/deployment/staging/austin/talos mise run tf:init    # first time only
TF_STACK_DIR=tf/deployment/staging/austin/talos mise run tf:apply   # renders inventory + host_vars

Then point at the rendered inventory and use the talos-subtree tasks:

cd ansible/talos/
export TALOS_ENV=inventories/staging-austin/inventory.ini

mise run setup       # first time only: python venv + ansible collections
mise run lint        # yamllint + ansible-lint + shellcheck
mise run check       # ansible-playbook --syntax-check all playbooks
mise run preflight   # SSH + Ceph health + bond0 + /dev/kvm
mise run prepare-hypervisors  # idempotent infra (bridges + libvirt + image)
mise run provision   # production full profile (default: 3 CP + 3 workers)
# single-host validation instead: mise run provision -- -e profile=smoke

After provision: the Terraform stack takes over cluster bring-up. See docs/runbooks/cluster-bring-up.md for the end-to-end flow, and docs/operator-handoff.md for driving talosctl by hand when recovering.

Safety posture

All roles refuse to do anything unless their *_enabled flag is set (defaults false). The prepare-hypervisors playbook flips them.
preflight is import_playbook'd by prepare + provision — Ceph HEALTH_OK enforcement is automatic.
Network changes are config-only and applied via networkctl reload, never systemctl restart systemd-networkd (preserves Ceph storage VLAN).
mise run destroy-vms removes VMs + overlays only; bridges, libvirt, and the base image stay intact for fast redeploy.

See docs/runbooks/smoke-plan.md for single-host validation (smoke profile, bounded first pass on a fresh hypervisor, rollback paths).