Laying the ground work for a hybrid AD, IaC home lab on Proxmox. We'll setup the Terraform provider for Proxmox and an early form of secrets management suited for a single contributor. Also, we'll do the manual work required to prepare a baseline Windows 2025 image for use in the deployment.

The focus in this post is mainly on Terraform, explaining some of the core behaviors & tools within Terraform. A bit of bash scripting is included as well, mainly to circumvent an unexpected problem with the Terraform deployment.

With all of the work needed to deploy the virtual machines done, this post centers around configuring them. We cover integrating Ansible with Terraform in a secure manner. A bit of bash scripting is in this one as well since IPv6 addresses must be accounted for. Additionally, as we are configuring domain controllers, we start to examine the requirements for Active Directory.