> too often are these kinds of statements thrown about without any qualification, as if they are self-evident truths It's because different people think in dif

> too often are these kinds of statements thrown about without any qualification, as if they are self-evident truths It's because different people think in different levels of abstraction. One admin might be thinking about a handful of servers and another an entire fleet of VMs. The way you manage each is very different. Clickops can work well for a small number of servers and a full orchestration setup can be over engineering. But your real issue is that blanket statements never work in such scenarios. However, I think it's pretty well established that reproducible server state is a best-practice. How you get there is up to you. But as an argument against backup/restore -- you can't use backup/restore to generate new servers from an existing template without some kind of extra scripting (if for no other reason to avoid address/naming conflicts). And if you're already scripting that...