You can download the evaluation copies of Windows Server directly from Microsoft. They are licensed for 180 days.

As the French say… Bonjour!

Where did you set the DNS server on your router for the clients? Did you set it in DHCP options?

Are you talking about bare metal or virtual machines?

Bare Metal I used Microsoft SCCM. It’s a pain to manage but when it works right you can easily use Task Sequences to deploy images with PXE boot.

I also had a previous install of Dell Open Enterprise Manager.

VMs, anything like Terraform and Ansible will work to deploy an image.

What typically happens here is you sysprep the machine and then you would convert it to an image. In enterprise, we’d create this “golden image” and then whenever we pass automation to create a VM we specify the use of that image. Once the image is in the right state, you should be able to select that image and then say “new VM from Image” or something similar to that. I’m speaking in generic terms, but Hyper-V can do this.

Capture image using DISM is basically how you do this when you need to do this for hardware via USB.