Dynamically adding Kafka brokers

Hi,

How do people handle situations, and specifically the broker.id property,
where the Kafka (broker) cluster is not fully defined right away?

Here's the use case we have at Sematext:
* Our software ships as a VM
* All components run in this single VM, including 1 Kafka broker
* Of course, this is just for a nice OOTB experience, but to scale one
needs to have more instances of this VM, including more Kafka brokers
* *One can clone our VM and launch N instances of it, but because we have a
single Kafka broker config with a single broker.id <http://broker.id> in
it, one can't just launch more of these VMs and expect to see more Kafka
brokers join the cluster. One would have to change the broker.id
<http://broker.id> on each new VM instance.*

How do others handle this in a software that is packages and ships to user
and is not in your direct control to allow you to edit configs?

Would it be best to have a script that connect to ZooKeeper to get the list
of all existing brokers and their IDs and then generate a new distinct ID +
config for the new Kafka broker?

Or are there slicker ways to do this that people use?

Thanks,
Otis