Wrap your head around the concept of Bare Metal (which is the process of installing an operating system on a server) and Bare Metal Provisioning Tools. The cluster management utility (aka CMU) we use at Pomona is called Bright Computing. You can learn about it here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/BrightComputing
In VMWare environment we use a hypervisor called ESXi. Here is the information on how that works (just reading it is fine, no need to reproduce):
https://4sysops.com/archives/how-to-install-and-configure-an-esxi-6-5-host/
In terms of Bright Computing, competition there is not much (HP acquired a French company, IBM's xcat is dead, Rocks is nearly dead, Intel has a proprietary tool). And finally, there are Cobbler (a veteran), OpenStack's Ironic, MaaS, Digital Rebar, Puppet/Razor, Packer/Ansible.
A good opinion piece: https://www.rackn.com/2018/01/17/past-time-give-cobbler-boot-dont-pxe-like-1999/
And another useful summary: https://www.zenlayer.com/bare-metal-provisioning-tools/