Well, no. But IMHO, iron is only do-able if you have enough of it. This I learned the hard way at my previous contract, where we only had a handful of servers a

Well, no. But IMHO, iron is only do-able if you have enough of it. This I learned the hard way at my previous contract, where we only had a handful of servers and all of them production. When you want to automate your complete infra, including rolling out hardware, you need hardware to develop and test on. Entropy of life will ensure that exactly that moment you need to reinstall that PostgreSQL slave from scratch, the PXE server is unreachable, or the server has a different diskcontroller, or an iLO certificate expired. Or something stupid. Test your code. And for Ops this means: machines that are solely for the testing pleasure of Ops. No other function.