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What operating systems does Metal support?
As of October 2024, Equinix Metal supports a range of operating systems , including:
- AlmaLinux
- Alpine Linux
- Debian
- Flatcar Linux
- FreeBSD
- Nutanix
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Rocky Linux
- Ubuntu
- VMware Cloud Foundation
- VyOS
- Windows Server
If we do not offer an operating system or a version of an operating system that meets your use-case, you can bring your own OS images using Custom iPXE.Licensed operating systems may require that you bring your own license, or are provided with an extra per-hour and sometimes also a per-core fee.
All of our operating system images go through a validation process in order to be provisionable on our server plans. Not all operating systems are available on every server.
Which operating systems are available on a specific server is listed on its product page and on the OS Compatibility page.
As of April 2023, Equinix Metal supports a wide range of operating systems, including:
- AlmaLinux
- Alpine Linux
- CentOS
- Debian
- Flatcar Linux
- FreeBSD
- NixOS
- Nutanix
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Talos
- Ubuntu
- VMware ESXi
- VMware NSX
- Windows Server
Equinix Metal also supports custom operating systems, giving users the flexibility to deploy their own preferred OS images if they so choose.
In addition to these operating systems, Equinix Metal provides access to a variety of pre-built images that are optimized for different workloads, such as databases, web servers, and container runtimes. This makes it easy to deploy servers with pre-configured software and settings, reducing the time and effort required to get up and running.
More information can be found on our Supported Operating System Images docs page
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