Hi everyone.

So i setup a lot of servers from time to time, it is not every day but from time to time i have to setup a lot of servers for me or customers, depending if it is a hosting server, an game server, email solution and so on.
So a while back a friend at a datacenter recommended me that i used a VM image with most of my stuff inside and to clone it, but that image was not working properly and i had to change lots of stuff like hostname, i installed VESTA CP and then the server ip's were all wrong, i had to delete the websites that have been created first not to mention that i needed to change passwords, install all the ip's on the eth0 interface, something that vesta does on it's one when installing it, and so on, also when i had to use different datacenter's having to upload/download big VM images is not easy. In the end it was a lot easier for me to create like a batch file for the installation or even to do it manually.

Most of the process is pretty straight forward, but a lot of it is boring like adding all the ip's generating dki's spf's software configurations etc.

So my main question is, being a linux administrator does any of you have a solution for this? is there a good path or software? i searched a bit and found a lot more questions, maybe someone here can point me on the right direction.

not sure if it is important but most of my servers are centos 6.x due to some of my client's software requirements.

thanks in advance

For me, I don't have to create a load of machines regularly but once they are created they have to be managed (~500 in the day job)

I have a barebones server as a shut-down VM, it has a "known" private IP address.
I clone this VM and boot it up, I then manually change the hostname and IP address to the "proper" values.
Reboot.
Add to Puppet.
Manage everything else through Puppet classes.

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