Shouldn't be a PITA. Look into Vagrant, ansible, salt stack, chef, puppet etc.
If you ice ubuntu... JuJu is terrific for either VM or container use. I have used it to deploy all of open stack services into a single "super size" AWS EC2 VM where the open stack was configured to use LXC as its virtualization. Worked fine for what I wanted. To back up or clone that open stack cloud only required me to snapshot that single EC2 instance.
How does salt compare with puppet?