Provisioning Virtualbox, which set of tools to look at?

I am using puppet to set up VirtualBox, Ubuntu 10.10 guest, Mac OSX host.

Once I get to a shell, things are working fine.

However, it seems to take a while, to download .iso and create the virtual machine itself.

I'd like to find a way to do this really quickly, I'll be needing the ability

to blow away and quickly reform virtual machines, ideally like "soap bubbles."

In the cloud, libcloud is working fine, but that is only one case.

What are my options to quickly create a virtualbox instance?

Set up your Ubuntu VM as you want it then use VboxManage export to make an appliance of the vm. You can then use VboxManage import to make the vm available again.

Look at vagrant. http://vagrantup.com/

I was built to work well with Chef but I think the Puppet integration is getting a lot better.