This is how I've started maintaining my development environment in a VM using vagrant. Packer will build the image from a source OVF, run provisioning scripts and ansible to set up all the things. Vagrant is also configured to run the same ansible playbook, so I can do incremental changes between rebuilding the base box.

I couldn't easily get packer to build a VM from the ubuntu desktop ISO, so I've built the source OVF manually with a minimum of steps. This should only have to be re-done on major revisions of the OS:

• create a VM in virtualbox
• mount ubuntu 14.04 desktop ISO
• boot to live cd, then install
• user/pass vagrant
• enable remote login
• shut down
• remove ISO mount
• export as OVF to ovf/ubuntu-desktop-14.04.ovf