My department has just been given the right/responsibility to manage our own VPS. The idea being that the bureaucracy will be less for the many small web projects we run.

Since each project will be managed by a different team, I was planning on approaching a shared hosting model. Are there any free pieces of software that would help automate the provision of resources each time a team request a new project?

Most of the projects have identical requirements - basically LAMP - so it would be these resources that I would want provisioning (and de-provisioning, if that is a word) automatically. Ideally, there would also be a way to hook it into our LDAP authentication backend too, though I could probably make this sort of modification if necessary.

Since we won't be charging our "client" however, we won't need the ability to generate invoices, handle payments, etc. etc.

EDIT: Sample workflow

1. Login authenticated against LDAP
2. Username checked against admin group (not on central LDAP)
3. Click 'new project' and enter project name
4. User created on VPS with project name as username
5. Apache virtual host created and subdomain (using project name) allocated
6. FTP & MySQL users created