2026.01.0 Release Notes

Released on March 21, 2026.

Highlights

GA provider surface is now explicitly documented as openstack, vmware, baremetal, and kind.
vmware is the canonical provider name in CLI help and docs; vsphere remains a compatibility alias for existing configs.
Infrastructure drift detection now covers OpenStack and VMware.
The default test lane is documented as a deterministic GA gate, with separate property, integration, and perf lanes.
The CLI command reference has been refreshed from the live Cobra command tree.

Area	Status	Notes
OpenStack	GA	Most complete production automation path
VMware	GA	Pre-provisioned VMs; drift detection is detect-only
Baremetal	GA	Pre-provisioned Linux hosts; no hardware provisioning or drift backend
Kind	GA for local/dev	Development and CI provider only
AWS infrastructure provider	Non-GA	AWS-backed service integrations remain supported where already used

User-facing provider help no longer advertises AWS, GCP, or Azure as supported infrastructure providers.
opencenter cluster drift registers only OpenStack and VMware backends.
Shell integration and completion commands are now included in the maintained CLI reference.
Kind documentation now includes KIND_EXPERIMENTAL_PROVIDER for Podman-based local environments.

VMware reconciliation is manual-only; drift detection reports differences but does not mutate vSphere resources.
Baremetal does not provision hardware or operating systems and has no cloud-resource drift backend.
Windows worker-node content is informational only and is not part of the GA support commitment.
Keycloak backup durability remains operator-owned; protect and test the backing PostgreSQL restore path separately.

Prefer vmware in all new configurations and examples. Existing vsphere values still load.
Use mise run test for the deterministic default gate.
Run mise run property, mise run integration, and mise run perf separately when you want the broader non-default coverage lanes.