diff --git a/cluster/saltbase/salt/kube-apiserver/initd b/cluster/saltbase/salt/kube-apiserver/initd
index 4fcb329f7b8..9db0f60932d 100644
--- a/cluster/saltbase/salt/kube-apiserver/initd
+++ b/cluster/saltbase/salt/kube-apiserver/initd
@@ -38,6 +38,9 @@ DAEMON_USER=kube-apiserver
 #
 do_start()
 {
+        # Raise the file descriptor limit - we expect to open a lot of sockets!
+        ulimit -n 65536
+
         # Return
         #   0 if daemon has been started
         #   1 if daemon was already running