For what it’s worth, Ive been using Ansible off and on at work for 8 years, and I think it’s pretty outdated and clunky these days, there are much smarter ways to manage workloads such as kubernetes, cloud-init, terraform, and NixOS. If you don’t want to get into Kubernetes then definitely learn NixOS.
Check out NixOS. It can build qcow images from scratch for you to import into proxmox
https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators
I have 8 bare-metal servers and I do everything automated with NixOS, I rarely ever access the servers directly.
Here are the nixos configs for my DHCP server and kubernetes servers that you can use as a base.
https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/porygonz
https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/nodes
For what it’s worth, Ive been using Ansible off and on at work for 8 years, and I think it’s pretty outdated and clunky these days, there are much smarter ways to manage workloads such as kubernetes, cloud-init, terraform, and NixOS. If you don’t want to get into Kubernetes then definitely learn NixOS.