Reproducibility

This section will provide an overview of each option's reproducibility. We will look at automation potentials and standardization.

Automation potential

Bare-metal deployment

Both AlmaLinux and Proxmox offer ways of an unattended installs on bare-metal.

AlmaLinux

AlmaLinux utilizes kickstart files, which can be hosted by NFS, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, or a directly by creating a custom ISO.

Proxmox

Proxmox utilizes answer files which can be fetched via HTTP or directly by creating a custom ISO.

Note

This would really only come into play if one of the hosts goes down and needs to be redeployed during the event.

Post deployment configuration

AlmaLinux

AlmaLinux can be managed by cli, bash, python, ansible and many others. The method of choice would be ansible due to the amount of community resources and built in idempotency.

Proxmox

Proxmox can be managed by anything that can interact with an API. There is an ansible collection for Proxmox and community made helper scripts to assist with deploying VMs and LXCs.

Standardization

AlmaLinux

Utilizing configuration as code (CaC) with Ansible to manage packages, compose files, server config files, and containers standardization is easily achievable.

Proxmox

Achieving standardization with Proxmox seems a little more difficult. A mixture of Bash and Ansible could be utilized.