Agreed on all points. Guaranteeing the entire installation is "documented and replicable" is huge. Chef/Puppet can become a large part of you disaster recover

Agreed on all points. Guaranteeing the entire installation is "documented and replicable" is huge. Chef/Puppet can become a large part of you disaster recovery plan and increases the "bus number" in ops. The value in this is immediately apparent after the first time you have had to rebuild a server that you inherited.