Oversimplifying it, Ansible playbooks are nothing more than some commands that should be run on a remote machine via ssh. Ansible knows or has modules for a variety of different package managers (apt, yum, etc) and automagically knows how to handle services or various config files.

It can get complex, but I think just the startup phase, until you have an inventory of remote machines, the ssh keys are in place, etc. I second the Jeff Geerling recommendation, his stuff is solid, both ready to use playbooks, and tutorials.

I would suggest to also look into cloudinit. Makes setting up VMs on proxmox easier, faster, more consistent, with users, networking, ssh keys, etc ready to use (by you or by Ansible).

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For what it’s worth, Ive been using Ansible off and on at work for 8 years, and I think it’s pretty outdated and clunky these days, there are much smarter ways to manage workloads such as kubernetes, cloud-init, terraform, and NixOS.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.

I’d recommend using OpenTofu (Terraform) for initial provisioning of VMs and then use Ansible for post-provisioning config & management. That way you’re letting both tools play to their strengths.

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/bpg/proxmox/latest/docs

Besides ansible, also have a look at “templates” and “cloud-init” for VM generation.

Please, for the love of god, look at other things instead of Ansible.

Definitely do openTofu for infrastructure and deployment, but for configuration of VMs please learn about puppet, saltstack, chef(cinc.sh) and especially mgmtConfig .

Ansible, by comparison, better matches what we were doing in 2002 at 1/10th the speed, and it’s like pascal levels of wordy.

Learning about options and finding one that works well for you will often give you a much better experience than fucking Ansible.

If you do abandon all hope, though, then go ahead and do Ansible; but remember if you do: there are better options, and hating Ansible doesn’t mean you hate automation.

Sounds like you are looking for Opentofu/Terraform. I use Opentofu to fastly create VMs on Proxmox with Cloud Init scripts. In scenario where one VM hosts one service I try to build IaC that way I can destroy VM and create a new one without loosing anything, data nor configuration.

If you needs are simple, write a simple playbook using the proxmox ansible module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/proxmox_kvm_module.html

Terraform/Opentofu provides more advanced stuff but then you have to worry about persistent state storage, the clunky DSL… used it when acsolutely needed, you can do 90% of this stuff with the proxmox ansible module.

If you need to make your playbook less verbose, move the logic to a role so that you can configure your VMs from a few lines in the playbook/host_vars. Mine looks like this (it’s for libvirt and not proxmox, but the logic is the same)

# playbook.yml
- hosts: hypervisor.example.org
  roles:
    - libvirt

# host_vars/hypervisor.example.org.yml
libvirt_vms:
  - name: vm1.example.org
    xml_file: "{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/vm1.example.org.xml"
    state: running
    autostart: yes
  - name: vm2.example.org
    xml_file: "{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/vm2.example.org.xml"
    autostart: no
  - name: vm3.example.org
    xml_file: "{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/vm3.example.org.xml"
    autostart: no
  - name: vm4.example.org
    xml_file: "{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/vm4.example.org.xml"
    autostart: no
    disk_size: 100G

Hello you maybe best do some reading up on how ansible works, as it can get very complex.

This might be a good sting point 👉 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/project/ansible-101-youtube-series