Best Home Lab Automation Tools! Packer, Terraform, PowerShell, and Ansible

Using automation provides a powerful way to ensure your virtual machines, containers, and hosts are configured and managed across the environment consistently, seamlessly, and securely. We take a look at using home lab automation tools to keep VMs and home lab infrastructure updated, configured, and using it to deploy new templates and virtual machines.

My blog:
_____________________________________________________

Social Media:

LinkedIn:

Github:

Introduction to home lab automation tools I use - 0:00
Hashicorp Packer - what it is and what it does - 1:05
Looking at Packer and a demo of running the command - 1:46
Talking about Packer and how it fully automates operating system installation - 2:20
Introduction to Terraform, what it does, and how you use it - 2:54
Looking at executing Terraform, state files, and configuration - 3:53
Introduction to PowerShell, background, and what it does - 5:08
Introduction to PowerCLI module for PowerShell and how PowerShell is extensible - 5:44
Looking at installing the PowerCLI module - 6:14
Using PowerShell and PowerCLI with Visual Studio Code - 7:04
Introduction to Ansible and configuration management with Playbooks - 7:37
Looking at an inventory file, the Ansible ping command - 8:46
Running an Ansible Playbook to update Linux VMs - 8:56
Wrapping up and thoughts on automation tools in the home lab - 9:20

Building an Ubuntu 22.04 template with Packer:

Automated Windows Server 2022 Packer Build:

Terraform vSphere tutorial - Linux Virtual Machine Clone:

Ansible provisioning VMware VMs:

[JasonsLabVideos]

I just finished my Esxi 8 install video, and mentioned you AND will be linking this channel !! Such good content here !

[ncriit]

Great informative video, by chance is the code you used for deploying a VM on terraform available? I'm having some issues understanding it myself but I learn a lot from examples and dissecting other's code. Thanks!

[lidoror]

great videos can you make one on virtual container in esxi?

[kharmastreams]

For some reason, my 2022 server packer setup hangs on WinRM connection.
(Have even used the ansible powershell script for winrm enablement, without it working)

[shawnlewis]

Great video! It has piqued my interest. Can you go deeper? Maybe some step-by-step practical scenarios?

[arntodd]

What about best ML/AI tools for home lab VE? :)

[jonpok]

Can You make separate video how to configure Terraforme ans simple code to apply something to vsphere? thx

[sinin]

Now we need some projects to help understand the possibilities of what these tools can do, and how they do them.

[vinvvinv]

Hi can you please make a video & explain the writing/structure of Ansible & Terraform in a simple manner & in layman's terms, like when & where to add spaces, hyphens, what is variable, etc it's a bit confusing ... please it's a request, do reply

[NetBandit]

When you spend more time maintaining your toolset and install scripts than just doing an install.