Why a baseline at all

Every VM in the lab gets the same small set of OS-level adjustments before it does any real work. Not a heavy "hardening framework" — just a handful of settings that make a virtual machine on virtualised, SSD-backed storage behave sensibly.

The value isn't any single tweak; it's that they're applied uniformly. When every box starts from the same baseline, performance is predictable and you've removed a whole category of "why is this one VM weird?" investigations.

Why we use this: a baseline is documentation you can boot. It encodes "how we run a VM here" as actual settings, so the answer to "what's different about this box?" is, ideally, "nothing." Consistency is a feature.