What's the benefit of OSBoxes in comparison to Vagrant and others?
Rather than having a VM be some magical preconfigured black box, I can peak at the Vagrantfile to see all the steps to convert a stock Linux host into a database/cache/MQ/xyz. From a security perspective it's much nicer too as one can reduce the level of trust to: 1) Do I trust the root box? 2) Do I trust the subsequent commands?
but creating basic baseboxes is pretty easy with hashicorps packer and the bento packerfiles repo on github.