The following section describes how to prepare VM template from scratch, e.g. to be used as base vagrant box or as a base VM template. It's not needed to perform these steps when installing any products, however, might be usefull to maintain version of base OS.
As a base for most VM templates, Scientific Linux is used. Download the latest version from http://ftp1.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/7x/x86_64/iso/