I have been working on a Vagrant virtual machine config for Socorro:
https://github.com/rhelmer/socorro-vagrant
Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) is a tool to automate setup of the VirtualBox VMs. It uses puppet to set up and maintain the VM (the puppet manifests are based on what we use at Mozilla for staging and production). Puppet will install and set up all dependencies such as HBase, Postgres, etc. and make sure the latest Socorro trunk is installed and configured for your dev environment.
This is still a work-in-progress and I am hoping to get continous integration up soon, (which will have the side-effect of generating downloadable VM appliances!), so in the meantime please let me know how it goes if you try it out.