Take a look at Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com). It's a command line driver and library manager for VirtualBox VMs. It's integrated with Chef and Puppet if automated provisioning is your thing.
I am. It is ridiculously slow. But I realized it is just a networking issue (hitting the host-only network from a browser on my Mac), so hopefully I can fix it.
Edit: Figured it out, DNS issue: sudo apt-get remove libavahi-common3
edit /etc/nsswitch to remove mdns from the list... that takes care of the issue and you can keep avahi for some of the other things it provides (such as automatic discovery of printers, and the likes).
Edit: Figured it out, DNS issue: sudo apt-get remove libavahi-common3