I like this and, eventually, want to get my homelab/homeprod stuff to that level. The only thing that seems to be missing, which is an unfortunate limitation of the free ESXi, is the ability to create the VMs.
My ideal solution would be to create configuration for a VM and its applications and run a command to have the VM created, OS installed, applications installed, etc. Taking it a step further, being able to regenerate my reverse-proxy configuration, certificates, and DNS configuration would make lighting up new services incredibly easy.
Right now I'm running my VMs on FreeBSD and managing them with vm-bhyve. There are possibilities for automation here, and I've done a little bit of it (at work) using Kickstart to install CentOS VMs and shell scripts to do the rest. Unfortunately, this is all very purpose-built - if I were to do it again, I'd probably scrap it in favour of Ansible or something similar.
Obviously I've got a long way to go to get to my ideal.
You could definitely achieve this with a whole plethora of tools like Terraform, packer and some kind of CI. But at some point you have to draw a line and ask what is ‘good enough’ for homelab.
For me, that line is drawn at hand installation of a particular OS and then conversion into a template. From then on, I can reference that template in Terraform or Ansible automation and clone it before customising it to the requirements I have that day.
The only requirement from using these tools against VMware is a vSphere instance. I’m sure if you look hard enough you can find that quite cost effectively on eBay.
And just remember that your infra is never finished. It’s a journey! And the journey is often more fun than the destination! Happy labbing friend.
For me, a lot of this is driven by wanting to know how things work.
For example, I can go to Digital Ocean or Oracle Cloud or Azure or AWS and get a VM provisioned in a minute or so. I know some of the tools involved, like cloud-init, but I'd really like to know how the rest of it works and to see it in action.
Honestly though, the number of times I need to build a new VM is very small. The time savings that come with each individual VM build will never recoup the time spent building out the pieces required to make it happen. But knowing how that all works will be worth it.
Yeah, unfortunately the free ESXi makes it difficult to "programmatically" create VMs. However, I decided that it was an acceptable trade-off for now. It would be super cool to run a script with "nothing" running on your network and have it set up everything from the ground up. Perhaps I'll manage to get there someday as well.
My ideal solution would be to create configuration for a VM and its applications and run a command to have the VM created, OS installed, applications installed, etc. Taking it a step further, being able to regenerate my reverse-proxy configuration, certificates, and DNS configuration would make lighting up new services incredibly easy.
Right now I'm running my VMs on FreeBSD and managing them with vm-bhyve. There are possibilities for automation here, and I've done a little bit of it (at work) using Kickstart to install CentOS VMs and shell scripts to do the rest. Unfortunately, this is all very purpose-built - if I were to do it again, I'd probably scrap it in favour of Ansible or something similar.
Obviously I've got a long way to go to get to my ideal.