I've been using Warewulf (&co.) for provisioning bare-metal clusters for decades (back into the Perceus days between Warewulf 1 and 2), it's a solid easy-to-comprehend tool that does things in ways that are transparent and built from generic [u/li]nux tools enough that they're not hard to think about when needed, but automated enough you usually don't have to.
Definitely shows its research roots, best-tested with RHEL-alikes, reasonably well tested with Suse and Debian, and you may be in for some extra work if you need provision something else, but that pretty much covers the common cases (and it integrates with containerization tools if you need some specific environment on the nodes).
It's a nice to have when you need to spin many nodes.
It’s that old? I can’t believe it took me this long to find Warewulf! I’ve tried the more complex solutions and this looks like what I’ve always dreamed of
Always feels like it will be simpler... you start with some iPXE, start building, and 6 months later you have a poor imitation of a product like this that works only for your specific use cases and causes you a headache if the company pivots and you have to make it do something new.
Been there, built that. Next time I'm using something with a community, and if it doesn't do what I need, I'm contributing upstream until it does.
Definitely shows its research roots, best-tested with RHEL-alikes, reasonably well tested with Suse and Debian, and you may be in for some extra work if you need provision something else, but that pretty much covers the common cases (and it integrates with containerization tools if you need some specific environment on the nodes).
It's a nice to have when you need to spin many nodes.