Automated deployment of customized Linux to machines?

Question

linux

In connection with the growth of the fleet of systems that require working Linux systems, and the monotonous installation and configuration of each one individually takes quite a few hours of life ... an idea came up ...
Is it possible to deploy the pre-installed Lin on hardware.
Rummaged in Acronis, etc. and realized that with EXT4 not everything is as smooth as with NTFS.
While the idea hangs over LiveCD + TimeShift ...
Maybe someone has already bothered with similar tasks and implemented them.
Tell me what did you use?

Answer 1

I have a new clean CentOS with passwords, keys, basic network settings rolled from the PXE server in about 4 minutes. The kickstart installation script is used.
Then I use ansible , which specifies the specific roles for this host. A couple more minutes.
If the system rolls out on a virtual machine in vSphere, then in general everything is done through Ansible - a special role kicks ESX, the virtual machine takes off there, boots via PXE and see above - kickstart, etc.

Answer 2

Probably the best solution would be to dig towards Ansible, Chef and similar configuration management systems.
Very widely used for the tasks you specified.

Answer 3

My answer - depends on what you need - to put one rarely changing image on a hundred computers every day, or for each of a hundred installations you need to customize the system.
In the first case, you can make an image and just install it via PXE, in the second, it's hard to do without Ansible/Chef/Puppet.
Additionally - Vagrant, Foreman.

Answer 4

The very simplest: telinit 1, sync, and dd to a new drive.
Although of course LiveUSB is better, and dd from the disk / image to a new disk.
Well, then, respectively, firewood, hostname, this and that ...

Answer 5

In general terms, I can describe:
1) We roll the OS, configure the system - install the necessary software, configure what is needed.
2) After that, from an external system, we pack the system into an archive or into a squashfs image, then simply unpack a copy of the system to the desired machine, cheat and install the bootloader (for example, grub-install /dev/sda && update-grub)
The main plus compared to that dd is that it's the smarter way - we're moving files around and there won't be any problem with disks of different sizes.