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You could definitely achieve this with a whole plethora of tools like Terraform, packer and some kind of CI. But at some point you have to draw a line and ask w

You could definitely achieve this with a whole plethora of tools like Terraform, packer and some kind of CI. But at some point you have to draw a line and ask what is ‘good enough’ for homelab. For me, that line is drawn at hand installation of a particular OS and then conversion into a template. From then on, I can reference that template in Terraform or Ansible automation and clone it before customising it to the requirements I have that day. The only requirement from using these tools against VMware is a vSphere instance. I’m sure if you look hard enough you can find that quite cost effectively on eBay. And just remember that your infra is never finished. It’s a journey! And the journey is often more fun than the destination! Happy labbing friend.

Mister_Snuggles 6y ago
For me, a lot of this is driven by wanting to know how things work. For example, I can go to Digital Ocean or Oracle Cloud or Azure or AWS and get a VM provisioned in a minute or so. I know some of the tools involved, like cloud-init, but I'd really like to know how the rest of it works and to see it in action. Honestly though, the number of times I need to build a new VM is very small. The time savings that come with each individual VM build will never recoup the time spent building out the pieces required to make it happen. But knowing how that all works will be worth it.