Work Local with your favorite editor or IDE! Then deploy wherever
I have previously written about the great Kalabox dev environment which is especially useful in the development process if you are using Pantheon hosting. When you install that, you automatically get VirtualBox installed.
Using VirtualBox you can work with other cool virtual machine images, like Bitnami, for example. In this article we learn how to setup a no-nonsesense Lamp virtual machine using the Bitnami LAMP Stack Virtual Appliance riding on VirtualBox, with no-nonsense virtual host based Drupal instances accessible anywhere on your network, and you can use a best-practices based process workflow with an Ubuntu server running right on your Windows, Mac or Linux laptop.
Quo vadis? Native Installer or Virtual Machine?
Creating the virtual machine instance
Take a snapshot and stop the virtual machine
Set up Drupal Instances with Drush and Virtual Hosts, not Bitnami Drupal modules