Build a custom box for Vagrant. I did this and now can spin up a CentOS 7 image with Apache, MySQL (Mariadb), RVM (ruby version manager) and a bunch of utilities (wget, curl, git, etc.) in a matter of minutes. I wrote up a how-to on my blog (in profile). I've tried Puppet but it just seemed like more trouble - that would be useful for 10's or 100's of nodes.

As an example, I wanted to try out Ghost to see if I liked that better than Jekyll/Octopress for a blog, so after 'vagrant init centos7' I had a VM running and I could screw up a ton of stuff then and not care.

You might be interested in my FOSS that aims to do just that: https://puphpet.com

It's called Docker.

Docker just spins up a VM on OS X with boot2docker so you don't get any real benefit here.

Yep, although it creates only one you can run a bunch of containers in it.

It feels almost as a native support, but the hack is betrayed by the networking setup.

I wish it would be possible to just expose ports on the real localhost.

Absolutely, I should have specified 'a single vm' in my response. I didn't understand that when I was first trying to understand boot2docker, and now I'm using imprecise language to help confuse others. Thanks for clarifying.

Docker is not a VM and only works on Linux.

boot2docker is a commandline interface to docker that works on Windows, Mac and Linux. (Maybe *BSDs too.)

On non Linux systems, it downoads a prebuilt VM, and runs it with Virtualbox.

This is how Docker currently works on other OSes.