I'm setting up a bare-metal hypervisor with VMware ESXi on a local server which will have a kubernetes cluster.
Should I use Linux containers with LXD to set up my Kubernetes cluster? or should I use several VMs that I can provide with my VMware hypervisor?
I'm not sure what you are referring to by using LXD to set up your Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes doesn't officially support LXC/LXD.
So, you can use several VMs for your Kubernetes control (masters) and data planes (nodes). You can either use straight docker or any containerd or cri-o as shims to run your container runtime.
In any case, most of this stuff is already set up by the deployment tools like:
If you are looking for something more minimal you can try: