I describe here an automated installation procedure to easily create Ubuntu virtual servers on the KVM hypervisor, using vmbuilder.

All the attributes of the virtual server will be defined in configuration files, so we will be able to reproduce and tune our server configurations later. Using this technique, complete server stacks can be provisioned. In this example we will create a virtual server for Drupal development. We apply some performance tuning for the install process, and the automated install of a new Drupal developer server can happen in 10 Minutes.

You will need an Ubuntu box with KVM and other tools for this exercise. How to get the proper environment with KVM working on Ubuntu 9.10, check this Howto.