If you're just getting started with Vagrant and find yourself stuck, try a different provisioner. I had a lot of trouble wrapping my head around Puppet, but was up and running with Ansible very quickly. Puppet, Chef and Ansible can all be used to build out your Vagrant VM's environment.
I just read about Vagrant, and Ansible last week -- I would love to read the ansible playbooks of folks to see what they are doing with them, and to learn more about how its done.
Ideally, I'd love to find some vagrant scripts and ansible playbooks to bring Amazon ec2 instances up and down and configure them with a standard set of packages.
What I like about Vagrant is that while a provisioner can help, it's not mandatory. If you're stuck with a legacy "enterprise! It sings, it dances, it crashes if you look at it funny!" application with a lot of special requirements, you can get up and running pretty quickly with a little bash and perl. I whipped up a Vagrant script for our app which is capital-F Finicky.
If you're curious, here's the vagrantfile and bootstrap script:
Yeah, puppet isn't the easiest thing to get started with, but the primary thing I wanted to use puppet for was to make developing my puppet manifests faster/easier. It has helped a bunch, since before I had to deploy to a fresh EC2 instance every time I wanted to test out a fresh build.
