Sure, there are many tools in this area, and they can be used in many ways. We used Ansible for infra management, we ran it against a VMWare cluster, not just

Sure, there are many tools in this area, and they can be used in many ways. We used Ansible for infra management, we ran it against a VMWare cluster, not just patching up virtual servers managed by something else. To a larger extent than we did we could have designed the system through VMWare GUI, including a fair amount of automation but opted not to, in part because higher-ups thought it sounded nice to have YAML in git and IAC and all that jazz. As far as I understood Ansible at the time idempotency in provisioning was easiest to achieve through a let it crash style, VMWare errored on naming being in use already and broke Ansible, and things like that.