Web application development on Virtual Machine

I apologise if this question seems to be unprofessional, but i am new to the topic of Virtual machines. I am a student developing a web 开发者_Python百科application which uses MySQL and Virtuoso databases.My university allows the students to host PHP web applications but does not allow students to install other applications on the limited alloted server space and in my case i would like to install Virtuoso. Therefore my professor suggested that i should develop my application on a virtual machine, meanwhile he would discuss with the university to come up with a possible solution.He also suggested that by developing the website on virtual machine it would be easier to deploy to the live server once we find one.

I have looked up free virtual machine servers like VMServer and VirtualBox but i am not sure if this is what is required in my case.Also i am still not clear how developing website on virtual machine is different from developing it simply on my PC. I would greatly appreciate any help and suggestion for my above query.

Thanks!!

Using a VM makes it possible to transfer your environment easily to another (physical) machine.

Installing on your machine
If you just install stuff on your own machine, you need to remember what applications you installed in what order and which parameters and whatnot you used when installing.
Than you need to redo this in the right order with the right params on the production machine, which may miss some stuff that you already had on your home machine but never knew about.
This can eat up many many hours of debugging time trying to solve issues.

It worked on my machine, but now it's borken, how come?

In short a possible nightmare scenario.

vs installing on a VM
If you install the applications you need to create and run your program on a virtual machine then you can just transfer the complete VM to a USB disk¹⁾ and than copy it to the production machine.
All you'll need to change are the network settings and because nothing else has changed (remember ceterus paribus) it will work.

Which VM to use
If you're developing on linux, find out which distribution your school has available to put the completed project on. Install that distribution on your laptop (or whatever) at home and use the VM that is included in that distro.

On Windows I'd recommend using a free version of VMware, it's the path of least resistance.

¹⁾ (remember to keep your VM small enough to fit on portable media, 15GB or 31GB sounds reasonable)