I recently gave a presentation titled Local Development Environments - Vagrant, VirtualBox, and Ansible. The presentation explains the importance and efficacy of using (and how to use) local Virtual Machines under VirtualBox, managed with Vagrant, and provisioned with Ansible, especially in comparison to using more traditional tools like WAMP, MAMP, or other prepackaged server solutions.
By the end of the presentation, you'll hopefully see how easy—and powerful—it is to create virtual machines for local web and application development.