This is one of the “magical” capabilities provided by Nix and NixOS imo. I recently used this NixOS module to build a new machine as a Proxmox VMA all while sh

This is one of the “magical” capabilities provided by Nix and NixOS imo. I recently used this NixOS module to build a new machine as a Proxmox VMA all while sharing the common config with my existing NixOS machine. I then imported the VM into Proxmox, expanded the disk size, and it booted immediately! There were a few manual things I had to do to get secrets working, but end-to-end, it took me about 5 minutes. You can do the exact same thing for other formats. For example, you could have a bootable installer ISO that takes your base config and adds specific tools on top that you’d want on a portable USB.