Hey everyone,
I’m currently tasked with moving about 2,000 VMs over to Terraform. Most of these are for our devs, and they’re organized in vSphere folders by username (e.g., Devs/jsmith/vm-01).
I’m trying to avoid a “copy-paste”, so I’m thinking about this setup:
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Global Module: One master VM module that handles all the vSphere heavy lifting.
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T-Shirt Sizing: A global map (Small, Medium, Large) so I can standardize resources across the whole fleet in one place.
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The Workflow: I want to manage everything through
terraform.tfvars. If a dev needs a VM, I just add an object to a map in the vars file. If they’re done, I delete that line.
With 2k VMs, a single state file sounds like a performance nightmare. Should I break these into multiple “Dev” folders with separate state files to keep terraform plan fast or maybe one state file per developer folder?
As backend I am planning to use MinIO, any tips on handling state locking or specific S3 endpoint configs I should watch out for?
What’s the best way to handle the Devs/<username> path dynamically so Terraform doesn’t trip over itself if a folder doesn’t exist yet?
I’ll be grateful for all advices.
Thank you so much 