Chef and Puppet can definitely do this for you, without servers involved. Another great use of Chef and Puppet can be seen in Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/ ht

Chef and Puppet can definitely do this for you, without servers involved. Another great use of Chef and Puppet can be seen in Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/ http://vagrantup.com/). Vagrant uses VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/ http://www.virtualbox.org/) to create virtual instances easily (REALLY easily) and then can automatically provision them via Chef or Puppet. Sweet stuff. I love the ability to bring up a new server with the things I want to have so quickly.