Base os install ad a template in your hypervisor. Ansible playbook with a task to spin up the VM, another task to setup network and required packages. Then other playbooks for the software/services setup.

I use NixOS but I don’t bother with automatic deployment or even automatic formatting. I don’t feel it’s necessary in a homelab setting as hardware failure rarely happens at such small scale and the manual steps left aren’t that significant.

At work, we use Racetrack, if that counts. It works quite well.

I use Ansible for all my deployments and just got a PXE boot set up with a preseed file to automate the install process and get the host ready to run playbooks.

I’ve been really pleased with this strategy overall. I think that Ansible works really well for programmatically generating config files which in turn makes moving applications between servers effortless. I control docker volume mounts with ansible variables and encrypt secrets with ansible vault so I can do everything all in one place.

Troubleshooting issues is a lot easier and recovering from a backup is faster and a requires less effort since I can just pull down the Ansible config from git and redeploy.

Setup a good kickstart script (even if it’s just enough for Ansible to Configure it the rest of the way). It’s awesome when messing with a system to be able to reboot select the reinstall PXE boot option and get a fresh install to tinker on.