On the Nefarious Designs blog today, there's a new post stepping you through every step you'll need (yes, every single one) to get multiple virtual development environments set up with Apache, PHP, MySQL, Python, Django, CouchDB and Twisted.

Since I’ve started doing all of my development on virtual machines, I began thinking about my development workflow: In theory, I should be able to model the perfect server environment virtually. I wasn’t sure what environment I wanted to end up with, but I had a good idea what basic virtual machines I wanted as a starting layout.

He sets up three different environments - development, staging a production - all with the same packages and all built on a base Ubuntu virtual machine. By cloning your customized version, you can built out as many instances as you'd like and tweak each for their intent.