Can Terraform be used to provision on-premises servers?

Question

I'm new to Terraform, but how to say run it on a regular server? Is it possible? I am talking - regular on premises machine

EDIT: Years later I come back to this question: Let me reform it. Can Terraform be used to provision a datacenter server, which is not on a hypervisor.

Answer 1

Terraform operates by calling into the APIs of various service providers and systems. Thus in principle Terraform can manage anything that has an API, and in practice it has existing support for a few different on-premises-capable systems, including:

• OpenStack
• VMWare vSphere
• CloudStack

If the compute resources in your existing datacenter infrastructure are already managed with one of these systems, or if you are willing to install them, then Terraform can be used to manage at least parts of these systems. (For full details, see the documentation for each provider linked above.)

Terraform's plugin architecture allows support for other systems to be developed, so other API-driven datacenter management systems such as The Foreman could be supported by Terraform, and indeed third parties have developed integrations with others that are distributed outside of the "official set" that HashiCorp hosts.