This is something NixOS excels at, but there is a bit of a learning curve. Maybe ansible as a non distro specific approach although I haven't used it myself.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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I’ve used commercial systems that provide what you are asking for. I’m not sure it is worth the time to setup for a home lab. I don’t see the ROI for it. Too much initial setup for the small gains afterwards.
I expect you’ll want to bake in a install config and likely a update-all.sh of some sort to each image you want to deploy. I think the frequency of that is the major time suck unless you only use LTS releases.
That said I think a PXE boot server is what you may be looking for.
I had a pxe server for my house a few years ago, and the effort maintaining it well outstripped the savings, especially for windows images. It was useful for learning, but not for real life usage.
Clonezilla. I usually prepare images in virtual machines and restore them on physical drives.
How do you deal with the hardware differences between a virtual machine and actual hardware?
I only tried this with windows which works fine: on restore Clonezilla has an option to rescale partitions on the fly to fit the destination drive. For drivers, windows detect changes and update them the first time is started on the physical machine.
I just have a bash script I run after the installation to configure things and install the software I use.
If you want to use OpenSUSE leap as your OS autoyast is made for that: automatic installation and configuration of new systems without (or with minimal) attendence
Or you could write an bash script that makes all those configurations and just run it after finishing the Install.
An ansible playbook would be another option to do these configurations semi-automatically
I liked fog a few years back
I didn't actually implement it, but it looked like the winner last time I looked. I'd also recommend starting there.
For work it's all Windows so we use MECM.
I have a set of shell / powershell scripts that I run post-install to configure everything. They are hosted on a local webserver, so it is just a one-line command to run the appropriate one.
Fog and sysprep.