Vagrant:

Web developers use virtual environments every day with their web applications. From EC2 and Rackspace Cloud to specialized solutions such as EngineYard and Heroku, virtualization is the tool of choice for easy deployment and infrastructure management. Vagrant aims to take those very same principles and put them to work in the heart of the application lifecycle. By providing easy to configure, lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual machines targeted at development environments, Vagrant helps maximize the productivity and flexibility of you and your team.

Vagrant is a development tool which stands on the shoulders of giants, using tried and proven technologies to achieve its magic. Vagrant uses Oracle’s VirtualBox to create its virtual machines and then uses Chef or Puppet to provision them.