I don't know how feasible this is, but one idea I've toyed with is doing all the installation and configuration except for the last steps (whatever steps you are testing) on a VM machine, then making an installable image of that machine and installing it onto the real hardware for the final work. It should be bit-for-bit identical to an install done directly onto the hardware, as far as I can work out.

Then do your final installation and testing.

If anything goes wrong with the configuration, you presumably will have been smart enough to have done snapshots along the way of your VMs (at various steps during the preparation) and you can just roll back to any snapshot if you need to, then fix things and push it back onto the metal.

Only problem with this is that I haven't actually done it, so I don't know for a fact that it works. It just seems like it should work.

In reply to Re^3: Suggestions on Deploying Perl Test Environment by dmorgo
in thread Suggestions on Deploying Perl Test Environment by diabelek

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.