On the Linode Library there's a recent tutorial posted about deploying Drupal sites (high performance ones) out to production server with the help of Project Mercury StackScript Linode offers.

This high performance Drupal system is based on the work of Project Mercury. Project Mercury aims to increase the performance and ability of Drupal powered websites to respond to increased load. This document leverages the same collection of popular open source tools including the Varnish Accelerating Proxy, the APC bytecode cache for PHP, Memcached for accelerating database operations, and the Solr search engine.

The tutorial shows you how to get the software you'll need installed, and includes details on how to configure each of them for maximum performance - Drush, Apache, Varnish, Solr, Pressflow and, of course, Drupal. All software is installed via packages to make things much simpler and snippets of configuration files and commands are included to make the setup relatively painless.