Better Solution for VM Creation and Management
Creation
Currently we are using acomibnation ansible-pull with a series of playbooks, cloud-init, and a script to make Debian Stretch VMs. This is a rather fragile setup which tends to need nudges and adjustments when used.
We have expressed the desire to remove ansible from the equation all-together.
To begin with, I think we move a lot of the configuration to the VM creation process by using Packer
Management
We don't have much in the way of management. What do I even mean by "management"? I'm not entirely sure. I imagine this would include actions like attaching (virtual) disks to VMs, address (re)allocation, and any other hardware configurations. Additionally, this would include pausing/stopping/starting, snapshots, and viewing metadata.
Currently I've been using virt-manager over ssh for much of this, and I'm about 70% satisfied with this solution for now.
Long term, virt-manager won't help us if we want to be more declarative in our approach, or if we want to do stuff like dynamic provisioning based on resource usage and other more cloudy things.