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One of my coworkers turned me on to vagrant. I set up virtualbox manually once, and vagrant seems far superior.

The biggest issue for me is that I have some largish databases I need to be loaded as part of the vagrant install, and these are a pain to distribute.

The best solution I have come up with is an external drive.

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You can also make your own images with the data pre loaded. At one point I was creating/updating/destroying a lot of VMs via Vagrant so to speed things up I made my own images. Then instead of fetching the base precise-64 image and provisioning atop it I could start off with an up to date fully baked VM.

As a bonus you can put them on a local http server and your whole team can download them. Just update the URL in your Vagrantfile.

This is actually what I'm attempting to do right now. Our prod database is Oracle, and trying to automate the installation of Oracle is a huge PITA. So I'm doing it once manually (or somewhat manually at least), and I'll just freeze that vm into my own box that other devs can use at work.

I'm really really enjoying working with Vagrant.