Terraform & OpenTofu for On-Prem, Homelab & Network Gear

Short answer: Terraform and OpenTofu manage on-prem and homelab infrastructure the same way they manage a cloud: through a provider that talks to the platform's API. Use bpg/proxmox for Proxmox VE, hashicorp/vsphere for VMware vSphere and ESXi, taliesins/hyperv for Hyper-V (over WinRM), nutanix/nutanix for Nutanix AHV (through Prism Central) and terra-farm/xenorchestra for XCP-ng. Cisco, Juniper and Arista devices have vendor providers, and community providers cover MikroTik RouterOS and TrueNAS Scale. Synology DSM and Unraid have no official provider, so Terraform manages what sits around them: DNS, tunnels and backup buckets.

This hub collects the on-prem, homelab and network-device guides on Terraform Pilot, grouped by layer. Each guide has working HCL for its provider.

Which provider for which platform

Hypervisors and private cloud

• Terraform Hyper-V: provider and VM provisioning: the taliesins/hyperv provider over WinRM, virtual switches and Windows Server VMs.
• Terraform vSphere provider setup: connect to vCenter, clone VMs from templates with cloud-init, distributed port groups, resource pools and folders.
• Terraform for Proxmox VE: API tokens, cloud-init VMs from a template and LXC containers with proxmox_virtual_environment_container.
• Terraform for Nutanix AHV: VMs with cloud-init and categories through Prism Central.
• Terraform for Xen and XCP-ng: VMs from templates through Xen Orchestra.
• vSphere provider v2.17.1 release notes: product_key is now marked sensitive.

Homelab storage and NAS

• Unraid and Terraform: Unraid has no provider, so Terraform manages a Cloudflare Tunnel and a Backblaze B2 backup bucket around it.
• TrueNAS Scale and ZFS: datasets, NFS shares and snapshot tasks with the dariusbakunas/truenas provider.
• Synology DSM: what actually works: S3 backup buckets from Terraform and the DSM API through the restapi provider.

Network devices

• Network automation with Cisco, Junos and Arista: a provider cheat sheet, one example per vendor and drift detection.
• SONiC: render config_db.json from Terraform templates and push it, or use a gNMI provider.
• Arista EOS and CloudVision: Studio inputs, workspaces and change control.
• Cisco NX-OS data center switches: VLAN to VXLAN VNI mapping, BGP EVPN and vPC.
• Cisco IOS XE: VLANs, access ports and OSPF over RESTCONF.
• Juniper Junos: VLANs, interfaces, EVPN VRFs and commit confirmed.
• MikroTik RouterOS: firewall rules, BGP peers and a DHCP server on a bridge.

Operating systems on your own hardware

• Talos Linux Kubernetes nodes: generate machine configs and bootstrap a cluster on AWS, vSphere or Proxmox.
• NetBSD VMs: Proxmox VMs from an ISO, or KVM through the dmacvicar/libvirt provider.
• OpenBSD VMs: Vultr or Proxmox, with pf configured through remote-exec.
• SmartOS and illumos zones: the joyent/triton provider, or remote-exec on bare SmartOS.
• Install Terraform on Raspberry Pi OS: run Terraform on a Raspberry Pi.

Running these guides with OpenTofu

The HCL in these guides is ordinary provider configuration, so OpenTofu runs it unchanged as long as the provider is published in the OpenTofu registry. Replace terraform with tofu in the commands.

• Migrate from Terraform to OpenTofu: install, verify state compatibility and update CI.
• OpenTofu provider registry: provider resolution, plus filesystem mirrors and plugin caches for air-gapped sites.
• OpenTofu state encryption: encrypt state with a PBKDF2 passphrase when no cloud KMS is available.
• All OpenTofu guides

Provision, then configure

Terraform creates the VMs and network objects; a configuration tool then sets up what runs inside them.

• Using Terraform and Ansible together
• Terraform vs Ansible: when to use each