If you want to automate the creation of Linux VMs on VMWare Fusion on Mac OS X, I have published to GitHub the tool I use and created:
https://github.com/castedo/vmxor
There are many alternatives (I think), especially Vagrant. But vmxor is small and simple and you might find it useful to cherry pick autoinst.xml contents and shell commands.
Enjoy,
Castedo Ellerman