The vendor has fairly long (6-12mo) release cycles and isn't interested in modifying the installer or explaining the whole process. How can I capture all the moving parts and installed bits (in centos/rhel) so that I can quickly spin up a testing environment with a known baseline configuration so I can test changed settings? The testing instance would only need to live for a few hours at most, but manually installing and configuring it can take ~3 hours, and I have 7 different configurations around the business to test changes against. Once installed the vendor software provides full featured CLI utils for customisation and configuration, but still they highly recommend GUI mouse click configuration over CLI.
Is there a way to automate the CLI menu driven curses-like installer and get it into my ansible workflow? Or am I better off going old school and generating 7x VMs to match the production configurations and stamp out a new instance and then burn it once I'm done testing?
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