“Thus, I think it's time to start a conversation about how we help
further this move by putting together a handful of official Rails
stacks. I'm envisioning something like a set of complete images for
web, app, and db servers respectively. »

Checkout this enlightening presentation by Ezra Zygmuntowicz: http://brainspl.at/articles/2007/05/20/my-xen-and-the-art-of-rails-deployment-talk-slides »

Rails Stacks. Yep. Rails distros (where "distro" refers this kind) coming RealSoonNow. Though frankly I hadn't envision it to be served as virtual machine images - talk about bleeding edge!