Recently I've been experimenting with Virtual machines for my development environment. The goal was to create a Virtual Machine that resembles our main production server, and have that Virtual Machine mount my workspace project directory as it's DocumenRoot. This way, my code could be served & tested after every save in my IDE. So no more building / committing delays. And all I could mess up was a Virtual Machine. I didn't know what software to start with and just tried the bunch. Here's my ever so subjective comparison 'chart' on Virtual Machine software.