Supported Operating Systems

Equinix Metal™ provides a range of officially supported operated systems including Linux, BSD, Windows, and VMware distributions. All supported operating systems are available for automatic installation when provisioning Equinix Metal servers via the customer portal, Equinix Metal API, or integration (e.g. Terraform).

Open-source operating systems are available at no extra charge above the hourly server costs. Licensed operating systems are available at either a fixed hourly rate or on a bring your own license model.

Images for many of the supported operating systems are built specifically for each Equinix Metal server type and stored in a public Github repository.

Operating Systems in the API

To get a complete list of available operating systems from the Equinix Metal API, send a GET request to the /operating-systems endpoint.

curl -X GET -H 'X-Auth-Token: <API_TOKEN>' "https://api.equinix.com/metal/v1/operating-systems"

The response will contain the OS name, ID, and slug, which is useful if you are provisioning servers through the API or CLI. It will also contain "provisionable_on", which is an array of servers that operating system is provisionable on.

Custom Images

Equinix Metal operating system images are designed for speed and efficiency, but that means they include a minimum number of packages. If you want to reduce the time manually configuring fresh operating system installs, you can tailor the supported operating system images to your needs with Custom Images.

Custom iPXE

If the operating system that you need is not supported, you can use Custom iPXE to bring your own operating system image. When initially provisioning a server, you'll be able to supply a URL to PXE installation tools like netboot.xyz, or your own iPXE script.