Turns out LXC works better than Vagrant for most of my needs. I'll leave this here though in case anyone else wants to use it. --- A set of scripts to help boostrap Vagrant base boxes. VMs should be setup as follows: - Disable USB - Disable audio - RAM: 360MB or 256MB - Disk: 40GB Use the following options during installs: - User: vagrant:vagrant - Hostname: vagrant-<osname>-<variant> (eg vagrant-maverick64-rvm) The following commands are useful for SSHing into boxes during setup via port forwarding on port 2222: ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -p 2222 vagrant@localhost scp -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -P 2222 script-name.sh vagrant@localhost: Misc notes: - It's useful to increase RAM during RVM installation. - Be sure to change hostnames **BEFORE** boostrapping the chef server. Ideas for the future: - Automate VM creation using VBoxManage. - Automate Ubuntu install using preseed file.