kMetal installs a curated set of components on the under cluster. They cover bare metal, virtualization, networking, control plane, and lifecycle — together they turn an empty Kubernetes cluster into a multi-tenant kMetal platform.
The full set ships as a single Helm umbrella chart; the components below are its sub-charts plus a small amount of platform-specific glue.
Networking
| Component |
Purpose |
| Flannel |
Primary CNI on under-cluster nodes — management-plane pod networking. |
| Kube-OVN |
Secondary CNI delivered through Multus — provides per-tenant VPCs and Subnets and the provider network for tenant egress / external IPs. |
| MetalLB |
Allocates LoadBalancer service IPs on the under cluster (e.g. tenant control-plane VIPs). |
Virtualization
| Component |
Purpose |
| KubeVirt |
Runs tenant worker nodes as KVM VMs on the under cluster. |
| CDI (Containerized Data Importer) |
Provides DataVolumes — the persistent disks tenant worker VMs boot from. |
Hosted Control Planes
| Component |
Purpose |
| Kamaji |
Operator that runs each tenant cluster's control plane (api-server, controller-manager, scheduler, konnectivity-server) as pods in the under cluster. |
| kamaji-addon-ovn |
Bridges Kamaji-hosted control planes to the tenant's OVN VPC so worker traffic can reach the api-server. |
Cluster Lifecycle
| Component |
Purpose |
| cert-manager |
Issues and renews TLS certificates for under-cluster services. |
| Cluster API operator |
Manages CAPI core + provider controllers (kubeadm bootstrap, KubeVirt infrastructure / CAPK, Kamaji control plane / CACPK). Tenant clusters are CAPI Cluster resources. |
Storage
| Component |
Purpose |
| local-path-provisioner |
Default StorageClass for the under cluster. Production deployments typically replace it with a vendor CSI driver against an enterprise array. |
How they're delivered
The umbrella chart toggles each component via a top-level switch (e.g. kubevirt.enabled, kamaji.enabled, metallb.enabled) and exposes per-component overrides under matching keys. See Helm Values for the values shape.