netdisco VS Fog

if it's an ongoing task, perhaps http://netdisco.org/ would be useful for you?

Currently the Arubas are managed by CLI/NetDisco. Its great, but NetDisco cant do much beyond identifying devices, and setting the untagged vlan - and I need to break out putty for anything else.

Netdisco does this. http://netdisco.org/

I heard about devbox [1] but I haven't tried it yet. Perhaps it could suit your needs.

Back in the day I used "Norton Ghost" to create a full image of a just-installed windows just in case I needed to go back in time. Windows includes a snapshot feature built-in but I did not really trusted it. These days you can use a "sysprep" tool [2] to create a similar system snapshot. Make a partition and keep everything you don't want deleted on drive D: or something :-).

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1: https://www.jetpack.io/devbox

2: like https://www.ntlite.com or https://fogproject.org

For provisioning the machines base image consider FOG it uses PXE and can remotely provision dozens of machines using multicast.

Same. We set up 1 device how we want to, then use FOG to clone the other devices

With standard computers, I usually deploy something like the fog project and automate the process over pxe with scheduled reboots. I guess you could do that as well with your VMs but that seems overkill.

you could setup a PXE server and automate installs. you could also clone them and reapply the image as needed. https://fogproject.org/ or lookup CloneZilla both are open source

Free: https://fogproject.org/ or https://clonezilla.org/

Microsoft used to have a free tool called SteadyState to do this, but it's been discontinued for a while. It took a different approach of undoing changes rather than restoring from image but it worked great with Kiosk mode. There are remote management tools that can wipe and reimage managed machines, most of them don't require an AD domain. As an example FOG Project.