Hello, I'm the author.

I mostly use OSX for everything. The only times I switch to the VM is when I'm having a hard time installing something (for an example, see my earlier comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2969509) or want to try a tool that's not available under OSX.

I admit the post would have been better with examples and without then unfounded critiques, taking notes for the next ones.

Just wondering if you could think of anything obvious I'm doing wrong (I'm pretty much a newbie when it comes to this)...

I'm following the instructions in your post on my Macbook Pro (2010); however I get 'Booting from DVD/CD... 180MB medium detected. Boot failed: Could not read from CDROM (code 0005) No bootable device.' I am using the netinstall Arch Linux ISO.

Many thanks!

VirtualBox also can run without GUI windows:

    VBoxManage start vmname -type=headless

If you need to see the GUI, you need the VNC extensions installed (which are, IIRC, not FOSS).

I may be missing something but I think you can do what is proposed with VirtualBox. I use it for my virtual dev machines and run them in headless mode. For example the command:

vboxmanage startvm "Name of VM" --type=headless

to boot an image up, takes about 10 seconds to be ready to ssh into (You can ssh immediately it just waits till it has booted to connect).

vboxmanage controlvm "Name of VM" poweroff

If you want to turn it off from the outside.

I used to work on Django project on a Mac. Dependencies like python-mysqldb can be quite tricky to install on OSX, whereas Ubuntu only requires you to type 'apt-get install python-mysqldb' and you're done.

More importantly, though, I do not like the idea of having all those services constantly running on my desktop system. I'm using Ubuntu for both development and deployment now and I still use a separate VM.

I think one of the main reasons why I like VMs so much is that they allow my base OS to stay relatively clean. Especially as I like to try out all kind of new stuff constantly, VMs make that easy without having to care how they affect the rest of my system. Even if you aren't trying out new stuff, keeping separate projects mostly isolated makes me feel happier. imho also configuring stuff becomes easier when your machines become basically single-purpose systems.

It's often a good idea to simulate your production server as closely as possible.

If you want no-gui VirtualBox that "just works" try vagrant.