Are you thinking about using Joomla, Tomcat, or a traditional LAMP Stack?  Do you need it up litterally Tommorrow so you can start developing a solution?  Don’t worry there are solutions out there to get you up and running a base configuration before in less time that it will take you to read this article.  This link to itworld.com has a great article about two solutions providers.  Getting servers up can’t be any easier with the solutions provided by both Jumpbox and Turnkey Linux.  Our experience so far has been that these pre-built servers proved an awesome jump start and save hours and days of reading documentation about how to set up the software.  Very often the control panels that these two companies include can help even teams of people with minimal Linux Skills to get systems up and running.  All of these machines should run in VMWare, Virutal Box, Parrallels and any other technolgy that supports the virtual disk/system standards.  In our upcoming article about Zenworks and Groundwork wouldn’t have been possible if I would have installed the systems from scratch.  The use of their Virutal Machines let me get the system up and running in about an hour each.  I didn’t need to setup MySQL, Apache, or anything else just download it and started it up on my VMWare server host.  So the next time you are planning a project check out these great companies and the solutions they offer before you spend to much time trying to figure stuff out before you know you have choosen the right software.