Ansible sounds interesting

Oversimplifying it, Ansible playbooks are nothing more than some commands that should be run on a remote machine via ssh. Ansible knows or has modules for a variety of different package managers (apt, yum, etc) and automagically knows how to handle services or various config files.

It can get complex, but I think just the startup phase, until you have an inventory of remote machines, the ssh keys are in place, etc. I second the Jeff Geerling recommendation, his stuff is solid, both ready to use playbooks, and tutorials.

I would suggest to also look into cloudinit. Makes setting up VMs on proxmox easier, faster, more consistent, with users, networking, ssh keys, etc ready to use (by you or by Ansible).

Besides ansible, also have a look at "templates" and "cloud-init" for VM generation.

Check out NixOS. It can build qcow images from scratch for you to import into proxmox

https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators

I have 8 bare-metal servers and I do everything automated with NixOS, I rarely ever access the servers directly.

Here are the nixos configs for my DHCP server and kubernetes servers that you can use as a base.

https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/porygonz

https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/nodes

For what it's worth, Ive been using Ansible off and on at work for 8 years, and I think it's pretty outdated and clunky these days, there are much smarter ways to manage workloads such as kubernetes, cloud-init, terraform, and NixOS. If you don't want to get into Kubernetes then definitely learn NixOS.

Hello you maybe best do some reading up on how ansible works, as it can get very complex.

This might be a good sting point 👉 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/project/ansible-101-youtube-series

NixOS and OpenTofu are pretty great. Add OpenBao to secure ssh keys and passwords and you can get a job as a sysops if you get good enough.

I'd recommend using OpenTofu (Terraform) for initial provisioning of VMs and then use Ansible for post-provisioning config & management. That way you're letting both tools play to their strengths.

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/bpg/proxmox/latest/docs

If you don't want another dependency, just get familiar with the provisioning tools of whatever distro you intend to use (Fedora Kickstart, for example), and learn how to quickly provision custom scripted thing with cloud-init when you provision something.

Watching this thread. I too would like to dip into Ansible. Looks like a really powerful way to automate things.

Start by creating a VM template in Proxmox. Male sure the template regenerates things like SSH host keys and machine-id on startup. Inside the template create a user with passwordless sudo and setup SSH public key authentication.

One the host with the private key install Ansible in a python virtual environment.

To execute this create a VM in proxmox, get its IP from the DHCP server and then add it to the hosts file for Ansible. From there you can use your playbooks.

The automated way to do this would be to use the Ansible Proxmox collection to create the MAC of the VM and then use a different collection to fetch the IP and set it static. From there you could dynamically add it to the hosts file. This is hard and requires more Ansible knowledge.

Another tool you could look into is pyinfra. Pyinfra has less of a learning curve since it is just python.

If you needs are simple, write a simple playbook using the proxmox ansible module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/proxmox_kvm_module.html

Terraform/Opentofu provides more advanced stuff but then you have to worry about persistent state storage, the clunky DSL... used it when acsolutely needed, you can do 90% of this stuff with the proxmox ansible module.

If you need to make your playbook less verbose, move the logic to a role so that you can configure your VMs from a few lines in the playbook/host_vars. Mine looks like this (it's for libvirt and not proxmox, but the logic is the same)

# playbook.yml
- hosts: hypervisor.example.org
  roles:
    - libvirt

# host_vars/hypervisor.example.org.yml
libvirt_vms:
  - name: vm1.example.org
    xml_file: "{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/vm1.example.org.xml"
    state: running
    autostart: yes
  - name: vm2.example.org
    xml_file: "{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/vm2.example.org.xml"
    autostart: no
  - name: vm3.example.org
    xml_file: "{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/vm3.example.org.xml"
    autostart: no
  - name: vm4.example.org
    xml_file: "{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/vm4.example.org.xml"
    autostart: no
    disk_size: 100G

I use it to initialize new VPS with my usual setup, but it might be easier to use a container format. I think Ansible itself has become a bit unfashionable since I started using it. I don't know what is cool instead now. It was Saltstack for a while but idk how long that lasted. Ansible is working mostly ok for me so I've stayed with it, til whenever.

Sounds like you are looking for Opentofu/Terraform. I use Opentofu to fastly create VMs on Proxmox with Cloud Init scripts. In scenario where one VM hosts one service I try to build IaC that way I can destroy VM and create a new one without loosing anything, data nor configuration.