#custom configuration

I work in a RedHat shop, and we use RHN Satellite. Lately I've been looking into Puppet to help manage my home infrastructure. The appeal to it is that, unlike RHN Sat or Landscape it's vendor neutral. Yes, I know there's Spacewalk available for those of us who don't want to pay the license fees of Landscape or RHN Sat but, again, it's limited to Red Hat distros.

I'm playing with Ubuntu at home, both for learning and to use, and I'm wanting to branch out into other distros as well (my laptop currently has OpenSuse). I don't want an app that's locked into a single vendor's distro.

So, for those who've been in the trenches with it...what do you think? How helpful has it been for you? Is it easy to bang out a quick VM of some random distro without too much fiddling? My hobby use-case is exactly that, I want to be able to bang out a new 13.04 instance and not have to jerk around with the installer. Similarly, I may want to do the same with OpenSuse, or CentOS... I'm not against doing it the long way the first time, but I'd like to be able to script it out afterwards. If you're using it, or have used it, please let me know. As I said, I'm very curious and it's in my personal project pipeline.

The link shows a step by step process of how to setup SQL Server Integration Services 2005 for SFTP using WINSCP.