Back in the day, when I was beginning to work on public-facing projects, setting up a development environment was really tedious. You have to install all the required software’s on the host machine. Relocating a project from one host to another sometimes comes to be the real work.
Now, the trend seems to have been changed. Once you want to work on a project, you start setting up a virtual machine on a remote computer that your company provides or a local virtual machine (at least in my company people prefer to work on virtual machines). There are many benefits, but one that I use all the time is the ability to take a virtual machine from one host and run it on a different one. Other than that, the ability to have multiple operating systems is very valuable for both development and testing.