Sidero Labs demonstrates Talos Hypervisor and Talos Director live at TalosCon 2026

Talos Linux remains free and open source, prices remain unchanged after the Yardi acquisition and the Omni Hobby tier is now free

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Sidero Labs, a Yardi® company, demonstrated Talos Hypervisor and Talos Director live at TalosCon 2026 in Amsterdam, showing more than 400 attendees the hypervisor running on stage and Talos Director operating Yardi's production cloud. At the same event, the company confirmed that Talos Linux remains free open-source software and that pricing for its commercial products, including Talos Enterprise Linux and Omni, is unchanged after the acquisition.

Open source and pricing commitments

In the Oct. 15 keynote, Sidero Labs President Steve Francis and Yardi Chairman Anant Yardi addressed the community's questions about the acquisition. Talos Linux, including Talos Hypervisor, Kubernetes and container functionality, remains free, open-source software under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. Sidero Labs' prices are not changing as a result of the acquisition, and the Omni Hobby tier, for up to 10 nodes and two users, is now free. Omni, Talos Director and Talos Cupar remain commercial products.

"When Yardi acquired Sidero Labs, the community asked two fair questions: would prices go up, and would Talos Linux stay open source? We wanted to answer them on stage, in front of the people who build on Talos every day," said Steve Francis, president of Sidero Labs. "Free stays free, and making Omni Hobby free is one way of showing we mean it."

Talos Hypervisor and Talos Director, shown live

Justin Garrison, field CTO of Sidero Labs, ran Talos Hypervisor on stage. A single system extension turned a Talos Linux machine into a hypervisor running Talos and Windows virtual machines, defined through the Talos API and applied without a reboot. Omni then built Kubernetes clusters from virtual machines spread across several hypervisors.

Neil Levien, director of cloud services at Yardi, showed the live Talos Director console that runs Yardi's own cloud, where thousands of virtual machines and hundreds of Kubernetes clusters have moved from VMware. The demonstration covered high availability, live migration, in-kernel micro-segmentation and Kubernetes cluster operations. In closing, Francis said attendees called it a standout moment of the event.

"Like many companies running virtual machines, we keep a close eye on new developments in virtualization. The Talos Director demo was a welcome surprise, and we were impressed by how polished it already looks," said Dominic Flock, DevOps engineer at Ratiodata SE.

"We came to TalosCon to see Talos Director for ourselves. We were surprised by how complete and robust it already is, and we have decided to evaluate it in our environment," said Cédric Rouard, IT director and chief information security officer at The Ring Ring Company.

Talos Cupar for private AI

Talos Cupar, the commercial platform for running AI on private infrastructure, drew strong interest. From one interface, teams select and fine-tune models, allocate GPUs and connect them to enterprise applications. Cupar runs on Talos Linux for AI, the free, open-source operating system for AI workloads. Yardi Virtuoso® Enterprise, Yardi's AI platform, is built on Talos Cupar and used by hundreds of Yardi clients.

"My biggest takeaway from TalosCon 2026: AI strategy is becoming a dependency-management problem, not a model-selection problem," said Dario Maisto, principal analyst at Forrester. "The industry remains obsessed with frontier models, but one comment from the event stood out: 'You do not need a frontier model to approve invoices.' Many enterprise workloads don't require the most advanced model available."

Coming up

Sidero Labs will be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City, Nov. 9-12, and at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas, Dec. 8-10. The next TalosCon takes place in Santa Barbara, California, Jan. 26-27, 2027. Talks from TalosCon Amsterdam will be published on the Sidero Labs YouTube channel at youtube.com/c/SideroLabs.

Availability

The Talos Hypervisor alpha is available now in Talos Linux 1.15 on GitHub, with general availability planned for December 2026. Talos Director is in Limited Availability, with general availability planned for January 2027. Organizations can apply for Limited Availability at siderolabs.com/getdirector. Talos Linux for AI and Talos Cupar are planned for general availability in March 2027.

About Sidero Labs

Sidero Labs, a Yardi company, builds Talos Linux, the secure, immutable, open-source operating system for Kubernetes, virtual machines and AI workloads, and the commercial platforms that manage it at scale: Omni for Kubernetes fleet management, Talos Director for virtual machines, storage and networking across the data center and Talos Cupar for the AI lifecycle. Organizations choose Sidero for security, manageability at scale and reliability, backed by enterprise support and a strong compliance posture.

Learn more at siderolabs.com.

About Yardi

Yardi® develops industry-leading software for all types and sizes of real estate companies around the world. With more than 10,000 employees, Yardi has driven significant innovation in the real estate industry. For more information on how Yardi is Energized for Tomorrow, visit yardi.com.

SOURCE Sidero Labs