Setting up a production bare-metal setup of a distributed system is going to involve a number of steps the first time. We have found there is a large range of existing automation and basic infrastructure in different people's environments.

Generally folks try out our Tectonic sandbox (vagrant based)[1], or Tectonic on AWS/Azure/etc before diving into bare metal to get a sense if the product. This can all be done really quickly because of the consistency.

What sort of data center automation infrastructure do you have in your environment?

[1] https://coreos.com/tectonic/sandbox