Bento

A modularized collection of Packer definitions for building machine images. A good place to start with Packer.

     

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Boxstarter

Repeatable, reboot resilient windows environment installations made easy using Chocolatey packages. When its time to repave either bare metal or virtualized instances, locally or on a remote machine, Boxstarter can automate both trivial and highly complex installations. Compatible with all Windows versions from Windows 7/2008 R2 forward.

     

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Chef

Configuration management tool which uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration recipes. Supports Linux, UNIX, Windows, and AIX as first-class citizens for management.

     

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PowerShell Desired State Configuration

DSC is a new management platform in Windows PowerShell that enables deploying and managing configuration data for software services and managing the environment in which these services run.

     

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Puppet

Puppet is a tool designed to manage the configuration of Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems declaratively.

     

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SaltStack

Salt is a powerful and different approach to infrastructure management, by focusing on high speed communications between large number of systems, and can perform orchestration, remote code execution and much more.

     

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Vagrant Cachier

A Vagrant plugin that helps you reduce the amount of coffee you drink while waiting for boxes to be provisioned by sharing a common package cache among similiar VM instances.

     

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Vagrant

Vagrant is a cross platform tool to create, boot, configure and destroy development environments. It provides a simple configuration-based approach to take a base image, boot it up, provision it (using any other provisioners), SSH, port forward, and much more. It automates the process of booting up and configuring virtual machines. It supports various providers like VirtualBox, VMWare, AWS, LXC, etc.

     

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Veewee

veewee is a great tool for building Virtual Machine images (aka base boxes). It automates most of the steps and allows you to easily create readymade images for VirtualBox/Vagrant, VMWare Fusion, KVM and Parallels. No longer need to shy away from building custom VM images!

     

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