[clug] Virtual Machine 'farms'?

[Alex Satrapa]

Me again!

Does anyone have experience in setting up adhoc VM "farms" using  
VMWare or VirtualBox?

I'm looking specifically for help in the area of setting up new VMs  
based on a 'template' (ie: specify the Ethernet address, turn off  
fripperies such as USB, CD, Floppy, turn on PXE booting), which I can  
then boot and take over using a configuration management system such  
as Chef.

What advice can you give me about doing this kind of thing from your  
own virtual machine experiments? Are there any existing tools which  
make this kind of spawn-boot-use-destroy experimentation relatively  
easy?

Alex