talosctl cluster creation (docker on WSL2 on Win11) with extra disks working?

[MartMet]

Hello everyone,

i recently discovered Talos and wanted to give it a try:

I have a WSL2 on Win11 running Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS and wanted to setup a simple playground cluster with an external disk like this:

talosctl cluster create --extra-disks 1 --workers 1 --provisioner docker

Everything fine, cluster is accessable via k9s:

PROVISIONER           docker
NAME                  talos-default
NETWORK NAME          talos-default
NETWORK CIDR          10.5.0.0/24
NETWORK GATEWAY       10.5.0.1
NETWORK MTU           1500
KUBERNETES ENDPOINT   https://127.0.0.1:36249

NODES:

NAME                            TYPE           IP         CPU    RAM      DISK
/talos-default-controlplane-1   controlplane   10.5.0.2   2.00   2.1 GB   -
/talos-default-worker-1         worker         10.5.0.3   2.00   2.1 GB   -

But i cant find any configured disks, i tried:

$ talosctl get disks -n 10.5.0.3

NODE   NAMESPACE   TYPE   ID   VERSION   SIZE   READ ONLY   TRANSPORT   ROTATIONAL   WWID   MODEL   SERIAL

Is docker capable of handling extra disks? Or this a problem of WSL2 in combination with docker? Am i missing something?

Thanks.

[rothgar]

Docker doesn't provide a full machine interface for mounted disks and doesn't do things like "reboot"

If you want to test a more complete talos cluster you should try the --provisioner qemu option. It creates full VMs which are much more capable with disks, network, etc.

It looks like it's possible to have nested virtualization in wsl2 https://usercomp.com/news/1068234/using-qemu-nested-virtual-machines-with-wsl2

I haven't used it and I'm assuming it'll be pretty slow, but worth a shot if you want to test more features.

[MartMet]

Thanks, I tested it with QEMU, and it works well.

I have a follow-up question:

Is it possible to configure or modify the talosctl commands used to start QEMU? Specifically, I’d like to disable the use of the KVM module.

Background: I have an older machine with more RAM for testing, but it runs on Windows 10. Unfortunately, WSL2 on Windows 10 doesn’t support nested virtualization.

[rothgar]

I don't think there are any existing options in talosctl for that right now. If you know what flags or commands you'd want to change we can look into it, but we don't have a lot of development cycles to keep compatibility with older configurations.

[smira]

Due to the nature of docker environment, all disks that are visible to Docker (depends on how your run it, e.g. WSL, etc.) would be available to each Talos container.

Talos Linux won't report them as get disks, as this is not what you usually want (that is your host system disks, and containers should not touch them in general). At the same time if you really want to, you could use them from Kubernetes, but I wouldn't recommend that for the reasons stated above.