TIL: deploy Debian 10 automatically with FAI
2021-01-11 00:00:00 +0000 UTCSecond TIL of the day, but a quick one. I run most of my development and CI VMs currently on an ESXI host. As a stopgap while I set up additional hosts using KVM and QEMU to manage VMs (which very easily support cloud-init), I discovered FAI, a project that provides fully automatic install images for Debian. While they are less configurable without a dedicated FAI-server, they still provide much quicker install of clean Debian for testing than a standard install.
To use FAI, download an image from the FAI download page and boot the VM from the image. Choose your OS in GRUB and continue. You can also generate an image using the FAI.me tool.