Of course the first thing that is going to happen is htat you are going to have a batch of arguments:
Xen vs. VMWare vs. $virtualiser
cfengine vs. bcfg2 vs. $(cool_haskell_config_that_will_be_cool_as_soon_as_it_is_done)
dpkg vs. yum vs. rpm vs. $packagemanagerthatdoesnotsuck
Ubuntu vs. Fedora vs. $(my_favorite_distro) vs. BSD
emacs vs. vi #this one may be orthogonal
It would be nice if we had something that just routed around all of those arguments and helped to set up a straightforward way to manage multiple images as part of one security domain, with monitoring and rekeying baked in.
I don't understand: eucalyptus looks like an open-source implementation of EC2, so isn't the end-result a bunch of blank virtual boxes? Its server management system might make it easy to load new slices with your custom disk image, but if you have that image, why not just put it on EC2 and save yourself the hassle of running a utility company in your spare time?
(Loading pre-built images to ec2 seems like a good answer to the op's question; I know I've seen some built-to-purpose images around.)
eucalyptus is only one part of what Steve seems to be asking for.
Ideally you'd have one location where you define the services you're running and the variables you're monitoring and you'd be able to do things like rekey the entire cluster in one operation, set ACLs for resources that exist on multiple locations, schedule batch jobs by priority and deadline; and do all this while totally abstracting away CPUs, filesystems, networks and all of the messy and bothersome failure-prone hardware.
Of course the first thing that is going to happen is htat you are going to have a batch of arguments:
Xen vs. VMWare vs. $virtualiser
cfengine vs. bcfg2 vs. $(cool_haskell_config_that_will_be_cool_as_soon_as_it_is_done)
dpkg vs. yum vs. rpm vs. $packagemanagerthatdoesnotsuck
Ubuntu vs. Fedora vs. $(my_favorite_distro) vs. BSD
emacs vs. vi #this one may be orthogonal
It would be nice if we had something that just routed around all of those arguments and helped to set up a straightforward way to manage multiple images as part of one security domain, with monitoring and rekeying baked in.