Recommended solution to deploy both to vm's and hardware (i686) ?
 

Hi all, this is my first post!

My company wants to deploy software on Debian servers. We need to test the software in a pristine environment, available (locally) to developers who may have linux, mac, or windows workstations.

I would like to use python to take a configuration (base system iso, list of packages to install, extra config files, etc.) and generate vm instances and install media from it. That way we can develop and verify against a vm instance, and deploy it as well.

Its doable, but we don't want to reinvent the wheel. How much of this is a solved problem? Is there another tack I should consider?

Regards,
Timothy

My understanding is that you want to have a set of VMs that are all
configured identically for use by several developers. If that's right,
it would be easier to simply create a VM that gets its name and IP
address from DHCP and let the developers copy it. Another advantage
to this is that any one developer can start over by simply copying
down the original VM.